


mockingbirds

by orphan_account



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-15
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:58:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eduardo's got a child whose mission is to make those silly adults come to their senses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a little fuzzy on what it's actually supposed to be so: basically a reconciliation-through-kid!fic story? Don't expect a coherent plot, is all I'm saying. And yes, Jay is impossible, I know. Sue me, I was just having fun ;)
> 
> Huge, huge thank yous go out to my two lovely betas who helped making this a hell of a lot better than the rough version that is at the meme :) Thank you, guys. You deserve all of the cookies, elefante_locura and Breanna :)

>   
> _So beautiful, entirely unnoticed  
>  A great serenity like your clean cloth shoes  
> The past, vague and gentle, lingers by the bedside  
> Like an old box  
> A faded bookmark  
> Summer is still very far away_  
> 

  
\- Bai Hua, "Summer Is Still Very Far Away"

\- - - - -

  
Facebook is down. This happens, even despite the fact that Mark can, most of the time, make the internet do whatever he wants.

The problem is that it’s been down for hours and no one can figure out why. The servers are running fine. The code is unchanged. Mark has been plugged in since Time Of Death 6:23 last night, and it's going on 7 am now. Twelve hours haven't brought him a single step closer to solving the problem. There hasn't been an attack on the main servers, no attempt at forced entry to steal stored data. There's no motive.

Twice, people have dared to enter his office. Mark thinks he'll have to apologize to the boy he called a waste of space; he shouldn't have said that. He takes off his earphones, rubs the bridge of his nose and wonders if he'll be voted facebook's biggest asshole of the year again. He's about to ask the guy who's just wandered in what he wants, without any accompanying insults, when he realizes it's Dustin, coffee in one hand, croissant in the other.

"Hey," Mark says, his face blank. "You remember you don't work here anymore, right? What are you doing here?"

"I, dear, am bringing you breakfast," Dustin says. He puts the coffee and croissant down in front of Mark, wearing a vaguely guilty expression.

Mark's eyebrows go up. "We have a gaping hole in our security," he says, "which you already know." And there's no way this is an outside job, so Mark is starting to get a nagging suspicion. "Any ideas what's going on?"

And he's right of course. Mark tends to be right a lot, it's not news. Dustin's crosses his arms behind his head. "You might want to check your private mail," he suggests.

Mark throws him a doubtful look, but opens his program. As usual, there are about two hundred new emails, most of which his assistant forwarded from his work adress and then filtered and filed into the appropriate folders. There is only one that was sent directly to his private adress. jaymerlion@gmail.com is not anyone he recognizes, which doesn't mean much. He knows a lot of people in the way dolphins at OceanWorld know a lot of people. It's when he opens the email that the surprise hits: the same second he clicks, Facebook's back up and running like nothing was ever wrong.

Mark clears his throat. "He - that's. All right. He connected a return notification with the controls that kept the site down." He stares at the email for a little longer, ideas running wild, then glances up at Dustin. "How did you know?"

"Ah... long story?" Dustin says.

It's a good thing he doesn't delve into the story right there, because Mark is already distracted by the content of the email he's received, which reads, ' _Do I have your attention, Mr. Zuckerberg?_ '

It could be a line out of any old thriller, so Mark is suitably creeped out and grudgingly impressed. He checks his back-ups, goes through a few of his status alarms, sets up another one, runs diagnostics. No one but Mark himself should have this kind of access to the mainframe. He eats the croissant without noticing, and burns his tongue on the coffee (as he always does). When he finally looks up, Dustin is still standing by his desk. He's going through his phone, patiently tapping his foot.

"Dustin?" Mark asks.

Dustin glances over. "What?"

" _You_ have access to the mainframe," Mark says slowly.

Dustin's shoulders do that funny thing they do when he's not comfortable with the direction in which a conversation is going. "Did I mention that I dropped in to tell you to go home?" he asks Mark in a very unsubtle attempt at misdirection. "I'm even offering to drive in case you forgot your car somewhere between here and your house."

Mark snorts. That happened _once_. The ping of his inbox keeps him from making a good comeback. He opens the email and reads, ' _You took your time with that, Mr. Zuckerberg. Btw, there's a package at your house. You might want to pick that up. No explosives. Promise :)_ '

Mark opens his mouth, then closes it again. As he gets up, he nails Dustin with a look. "You win. I'm going home. But you've got some explaining to do."

Dustin pockets his phone. "Let's get you home first. You know, Mark, I honestly thought you might be glued to that chair."

  
\- - - - -

  
In the car, Mark asks Dustin twice, which is twice more than he usually asks; but Dustin just says, "I'm driving. Do you want to end up on the news tomorrow because we totaled some asshole's Maserati?" And Mark could buy said asshole's Maserati, his Malibu beach house and his wife, but he stays silent because he doesn't need to voice every single one of his thoughts at all times.

When they arrive at Mark's house, a package has indeed arrived and been brought in by housekeeping, sitting on the hallway organizer.

"Are you sure about the explosives?" Mark asks as he heads for it.

Dustin rolls his eyes. "Just open it. I'm curious what the brat sent you myself."

"You're being intentionally obtuse, and I don't like it," Mark tells him. He takes the package, shakes it lightly. It's not very heavy. The postage stamp, which reads Singapore, makes him hesitate as the pieces start to fall together. Except the brat part. "All right, I'll bite," he says and heads to the kitchen, grabs a knife and cuts the tape, then tears the top off.

The first thing he finds is an old, folded sweater. Mark recognizes it; it's over ten years old. His mother bought it for him before freshman year. Eduardo borrowed it one evening when he slept over and Mark never got it back. It smells of laundry detergent and has been washed so often the material has thinned out in places. There's an old hard drive of Mark's and an old notepad with his scribbles, writings from calc class, cartoon character drawings of Eduardo and Dustin and Chris and himself as superheroes.

"Wow, are those - is that what Project Cape from freshman year was all about? You never said! These are really good, Mark."

Mark closes the notebook quickly. "This is stuff Eduardo kept," he says, keeping his voice intentionally bland. There's a picture frame with a photograph of Eduardo and himself, Eduardo in that stupid straw hat of his. This is Eduardo's; Mark has never owned a picture frame in his life. The photograph, he vaguely remembers. "What is this?" he turns to Dustin. "Are you fucking with me?"

"What? No, man, relax, this is not me. I told you, the only thing I have to do with this is occasional email contact with the culprit. And for the record, I'm not the only one. Chris does, too, so if you wanna be mad, be mad at both of us."

Mark ignores all but the vital information. "Wardo didn't send me this stuff. We haven't talked in almost a decade. And if it wasn't him…" He trails off. He's not an idiot, he knows where this is going, but he cannot quite yet believe it, so he chooses to believe there is another explanation. He glares at Dustin.

Dustin shrugs like he's not scared, which is frustrating. Mark is used to people cowering when he glares at them.

"Well," Dustin says, "it looks like that’s about to change, at least." He grins and twirls around Mark in a half-circle, making a grab for the notebook. "Apparently, Eduardo's kid discovered daddy's past and has decided to do something about it."

  
\- - - - -

  
Since Dustin refuses to tell Mark more about Eduardo's new familial situation without Eduardo's consent, Mark kicks him out. He's deadly tired at that point, so he goes up to his room and falls head-first into his bed. He doesn't even manage to take off his pants before he's fast asleep.

Six hours later, he's woken by the buzz of his phone. It's his private phone, but the text message is not from any of the usual suspects like his family or Dustin, or Sean, or even that girl from his arts class he's given his number. It's an unknown number. It says, ' _Dustin's a traitor. he will pay._ ' And then, after a second buzz, ' _we're flying into the US tomorrow. thought u might wanna know._ '

Mark wants to reply, but he has no idea what to say. In his head, there's an image of Eduardo as he might have looked when he was- Jesus, how old could the child possibly be? Last time he checked, Wardo didn't have a kid when he graduated from Harvard. Even if he got a girl pregnant in senior year – and the thought makes something in Mark churn like ice – it would make the kid no older than nine years old. Probably younger.

The pause draws out as he hovers over the Reply button. The third buzz comes almost expected. ' _sorry for being forward, mr. Zuckerberg. u should pick us up if u want. SJC, landing 5pm._ '

It explains the formal address, at least. Of course, Eduardo would have taught the kid manners. The content of the message is straightforward enough, however. Mark's mind wanders to the sweater and the picture frame and for a second, he wonders if he wants to see Eduardo. He finds he doesn't have the energy to lie to himself; the thought of seeing Eduardo makes his stomach flip, familiar and welcome.

  
\- - - - -

  
He goes to work. He gets IDed like he does every morning. They used to just say, "Good morning, Mr. Zuckerberg," and let him pass, so Mark had to explain that they couldn't just drop security protocol because someone looked like him. It might be an imposter. He knows most of them think he's crazy now, but - how likely is it that the imposter will also kidnap Mark to steal his ID card? The probability drops significantly.

He walks through the halls of the Facebook offices, watching people mull over problems, typing at their computers, lines of code on the walls that transform into ideas in his head as he reads them. Back when he started Facebook, Mark had imagined it would make him one of the cool kids; he thought that it would get him on the inside, his very own special club he could be a part of. But walking through the halls, proud as he is of the accomplishment, he knows that's not what he achieved. He can never be on the inside because the owner only ever gets to watch. He thinks of Eduardo, and his kid, maybe his lovely wife, whoever it is, a Harvard girl or a woman from Singapore who smiled at him on the street. He wonders if that's why people have families. To belong to something.

When Mark arrives at his desk, he puts on his headphones and cracks his knuckles. He'll find out how the kid did it today. And if Eduardo still hates him, after all these years, maybe Mark can report the breach to the police. It's the asshole thing to do, but it might make Eduardo look at him again, if only with that disappointed, betrayed look he had throughout the whole deposition process. He wonders if it would be worth it anyway.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark spots Eduardo immediately, even with the dozens of people exiting the airport gates, swarming off in all directions. Eduardo's not wearing a suit; he's dressed in comfortable sweatpants and a hoodie, a mental image that takes Mark back to days spent sitting on the floor of their Kirkland apartment, playing video games, snacking on chips. Eduardo's pulling a suitcase and chatting with a boy by his side who is dragging a similar suitcase. Expecting a smaller Eduardo double, it comes as a shock that Jay is clearly Asian, with half-long black hair falling over his ears and into his eyes.

Someone bumps into Mark and he has to shuffle a step to the side, and that's the moment the boy looks up and catches Mark's gaze. His eyes widen, disbelief visible for a split second before the corners of his lips turn up in a smirk. Mark's gaze jumps to Eduardo, who hasn't noticed anything yet. He's busy searching his jacket pockets and then there's only a few feet separating them, and the boy says in a surprisingly high voice, "Dad." Eduardo's chin rocks up at the word, search forgotten. He follows Jay's line of vision to find Mark.

Mark feels his stomach drop, a feeling similar to when he'd first held a presentation before thousands of unfamiliar faces. This should be easier, but it really isn't. He fights not to let any of it show on his face, stuffs his hands into his jeans, and says, "Hey," in the calmest voice he can manage.

Eduardo just stares for a while. His face hasn't lost any of its expressiveness, and Mark can see him run through a roller coaster of emotions before he settles on a mix of curiosity and surprise and asks, "Mark. What are you doing here?" He doesn't sound accusatory.

Maybe he thinks Mark's here to catch a flight to some lonely island nation where he'll never have to be in a similarly awkward situation ever again. Mark would like that, if he had the choice. But the problem is that he has no idea how not to be here. He can't say that,, so he tells the other truth. "Your kid hacked into the Facebook mainframe."

Eduardo whips around to Jay so fast Mark has trouble following, furious. "You did what?" he asks, and Jay shrinks, his eyes widening to an impossible size. Mark can suddenly see the resemblance.

"I didn't mess anything up," Jay protests. "And I didn't leave any traces, so there'll be no trouble."

"Wouldn't be too sure about that," Mark quips.

Jay turns to him, eyebrows high. "What?"

Before they can get into it, Eduardo steps forward. His face is red and he looks like he'd rather be anywhere but here, but to his credit, he looks Mark in the eye when he says, "I am so sorry about this. I have no idea how big the damage is, but -"

"Dad, I didn't do -"

"Don't even," Eduardo warns. "Jesus, Jay, you are in so much trouble."

They're making quite a scene in the middle of the airport, which wasn't Mark's plan. "Look, maybe we should move this somewhere else, get out of the airport," he says. "People are starting to stare."

Eduardo glances around and when he realizes Mark's right, he agrees quickly and waves in the direction of the exit out front. When they start to walk towards it, he says, "Look, Mark -"

"It's actually fine," Mark interrupts him. "I didn't mean to imply anything."

Eduardo gives him an unsure look.

"I'm serious, it's fine. Well, Facebook was down for a few hours, but one could argue that was my own fault. And I did find some possible traces, incidentally, but that's not how I found out who was responsible."

"How'd you find out?"

"Dustin."

Eduardo swears and flicks a glare back at Jay. "Dustin's in on this?"

"And he sent me a text," Mark adds.

"Who, Dustin?"

"No. Your - he did." Mark nods his head towards Jay.

"I did," Jay agrees from somewhere behind them, trailing them sullenly. "See, it's not at all like that time with the CIA. Also, for your information, Mr. Zuckerberg, I'm a girl."

Mark blinks and turns his head. He's not sure how old the kid - she is, but probably not old enough for boobs... and he has a feeling Eduardo would castrate him if he looked there, anyway, so he doesn't. Mostly, he has trouble wrapping his head around the fact that a little girl got past all his security. When Eduardo snorts, half-grin spreading across his face, almost like he's reading Mark's mind, Mark finds that he cannot stop staring, warmth blossoming in his chest.

  
\- - - - -

  
By the time they're outside, Eduardo is no longer smiling. He looks pensive when he asks, "So if this isn't about Jay hacking into Facebook, what is it about?" When Mark hesitates and Jay shifts, looking from Mark to Eduardo and back to Mark, he seems to realize what's going on. "Right," he says. "The texting. I think I can see where this is going." He doesn't sound mad anymore, just exasperated. "Jay…"

Jay huffs. "I have no idea how you could think I wouldn't find out what happened with Facebook a few years ago. I asked around, I looked up things. It wasn't hard."

Mark sneaks a glance at Eduardo's face. There's something achingly soft about his gaze suddenly, something like regret. It makes Mark's chest feel tight, so he looks away. When Eduardo says, "Can we talk about this later?" his face has already shuttered close again, expression cool. "Mark - I'm sorry Jay dragged you out here, but you shouldn't have come. And if you're not going to share any details about what you want, we've got to get going. I have a business meeting in the morning and we're both tired from the flight."

He does look tired. He always did after flying out to California, too, back when he was still CFO. Mark bites his lip. "I drove here. I could drop you off."

Eduardo looks surprised at the offer. "Why?"

Mark shrugs.

"Right." Eduardo swallows. "Right. Well, if it's all the same to you." He awkwardly grabs for the handle of his suitcase. "Then the offer is appreciated. Thank you."

He's trying to be an adult about this, Mark realizes. Wardo's not all right, and he hasn't forgotten what happened, otherwise he wouldn't be so dismissive; but being a good role model to the kid is more important than having a fit about something they did when they were teenagers. It's both disheartening and a relief at the same time.

Mark pulls himself together and takes out his car keys. "Over there," he points out, and starts off towards the parking lot. Halfway to the car he remembers how in movies, people always offer to take other people's things, but neither of them looks like they'd appreciate it if he took their suitcases off them, so he keeps quiet. The silence is stilted and uncomfortable by the time they're getting themselves into their seats. Jay's in the back, playing around with her phone, and Eduardo's staring straight ahead. Mark turns on the engine wordlessly and starts driving.

"Which hotel?" he asks once they're out of the airport traffic and heading towards Palo Alto.

"Harbor Court, downtown San Francisco," Eduardo says. "It's pretty far out of your way. Are you sure you want to drive there?"

"It's fine," Mark says.

Eduardo closes his mouth and leans back into the seat. In the back, Jay makes a noise of protest. When no one asks what's going on, she says, in a tone of voice Mark typically associates with bratty children all over the world, "I really hate hotels." It makes Eduardo wince guiltily and Mark can feel the triumph radiate from Jay at the movement. Suddenly he gets what's going on.

In general, Mark is fairly ambivalent regarding children. He gets that they like it when he talks to them like they're adults, and most kids are fun to be around when they're not being needy or whiny; they have all these ideas and opinions they are unabashedly honest about. But he has difficulty reading them when they look at him expectantly, and he gets frustrated when they do get needy or whiny.

This deal, though, he knows. This deal he used enough times on his own parents to get what he wanted when he was a kid.

"Sweetheart," Eduardo starts. "It's just a few days."

"They never have enough bandwidth at these places, so I won't be able to do my homework."

"I'll ask the manager if they can do something about it. C'mon, don't be like that."

Jay leans forward, putting her chin on Eduardo's seat cushion. Her lower lip's jutted out. "I'll be bored to death. They never have any good video games. I'm not six, I don't want to play Disney Princess games."

"Jay, you're not playing Halo again until you're fourteen."

And now the ace up her sleeve, Mark thinks.

"I'm missing fencing class tonight!"

Eduardo winces again, this time for another reason entirely. Mark turns his head to give him a look, and earns himself a sharp, "Eyes on the road, Mark."

"Fencing class?" Mark asks.

"It's a popular activity for kids in Singapore."

"It's really not. But we were talking about how much hotels suck," Jay reminds them, eyes dancing.

Mark bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from smiling. "I have really good bandwidth," he says nonchalantly, as if it just occurred to him.

"No," Eduardo says.

"And a lot of video games -"

"You can't -"

"- that are age-appropriate, but still cool."

"Mark."

"I wrote a fencing program for my Kinnect."

"Ward - Dad. Please? That sounds way better than the hotel. Can we please go? I promise I won't try to get the latest NASA space rocket to launch early if we stay at Mr. Zuckerberg's place."

"Oh, well, if you _promise_ ," Eduardo deadpans.

Mark smirks.

"Stop smirking, you bastard," Eduardo orders him, but the sharpness is gone from his voice.

"You can call me Mark, Jay," Mark says magnanimously.

Eduardo lets his head fall back into the cushion with an exasperated, "Fuck."

Jay gasps. Mark hides his smirk better this time, because getting an elbow to the side while driving is dangerous, and also, it hurts. He takes the next exit off the 101, heading home.

  
\- - - -

  
He puts the car in park and gets out, followed by a grumbling Eduardo and a beaming Jay. When they arrive on his front steps though, Jay makes a confused face and says, "Aren't you, like, a billionaire, Mark?" And when Mark nods, unlocking the front door, she concludes, "I'm underwhelmed."

"Jay," Eduardo chastises. He glances at Mark, looking uncomfortable and possibly a little underwhelmed himself.

Mark smirks. "It's bigger on the inside."

Jay makes a choked-off sound that's half-laugh, half-groan and slips inside. When Mark turns to check on Eduardo, he meets a startled gaze.

"What?" he asks defensively.

"We watched that show ten years ago," Eduardo says.

Mark shrugs. "I have a good memory." In college, he always pretended to disdain Doctor Who for its cheesy messages and incorrect science, no matter how much the other guys loved it (or maybe because of that). He doesn't say that he has all the DVDs now, just because he knows the British accents used to turn Eduardo on.

There's a crash inside the house, then a muttered, "Whoops." Eduardo's face turns red and panicked.

"Everything's fine!" Jay calls from the living room. "Sorry, Mark!"

Mark snorts. "Don't worry about it. Here, this way." He leads the way to two adjoining rooms, one of which is a guest room, the other of which is a small office that holds a pull-out couch.

"This really isn't necessary," Eduardo tells him.

"It's fine," Mark says.

"You've said that multiple times. Mark. Stop. Look at me."

Mark stops and looks at him. It's not like he has much choice anyway, since they're inside the guest room and there's nowhere else for him to go. Eduardo looks serious, and kind of heart-broken. Mark wants to do something about that, but he doesn't know what. He doesn't know what Eduardo sees when he looks at Mark, but it makes him sad that he can still make Eduardo feel this upset.

"Mark, why are you doing this?" Eduardo asks quietly.

"You hate hotels," Mark reminds him.

"Not anymore."

"Right." Mark doesn't manage to suppress the disbelieving smirk, and he knows before Eduardo can say anything that he's managed to piss him off.

"This was a bad idea," Eduardo says, as if on cue, and he sounds annoyed at himself. "We should go, the hotel's -"

"Sorry," Mark apologizes quickly. "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to make you angry."

"Why are you doing this, Mark? I really don't get you at all. We haven't seen each other in forever. And all of the sudden, we're just… here?"

Mark has no idea what to say to that. He can't tell him that he'd have done this a lot sooner if he'd thought Eduardo would be receptive, that he all but jumped at the chance when it presented itself. He doesn't want Eduardo to tell him to fuck off, that there's no chance of this ever happening. Whatever this is.

Thankfully, he's saved from replying by Jay, who comes running into the room, out of breath, holding up Mark's home-built laser gun. "Oh my god, Wardo, look what I found in Mark's living room!"

  
\- - - - -

  
They stay, even though Eduardo doesn't look happy about it. But it's getting late, and as he said, he has an early start tomorrow. Jay doesn't protest when he tells her to wash up and go to bed. Eduardo's furious glare at Mark while handing the laser gun back to him might have been an indication that she'd do well not to overstep another line today.

So Mark goes up to his room and codes for an hour. When his stomach starts rumbling, he realizes he hasn't eaten all day, so he gets up to go to the kitchen. Down the stairs, he hears hushed, agitated voices coming from Eduardo's room. He's tempted for a second to listen what that's about, but decides not to, and heads for the fridge instead, hoping there will be some eggs left. He doesn't want to hear Eduardo explaining to the kid what happened between them, if that's what they're talking about. It's not like he can go and say, 'That's not how it went!' whenever Eduardo gets facts wrong, or 'That's not what that was all about' whenever Eduardo doesn't understand. He also doesn't know what Eduardo can add that Jay hasn't already read on the internet.

Or heard from other nosy, interfering people, for that matter, he realizes when his phone buzzes with a message from Dustin. The eggs are in the frying pan at that point, crackling quietly, so he reads, ' _Everyone alive over there_?'

He types back, ' _Who're you guessing is dead?_ '

' _Chris's betting on you. 'm all Eduardo cuz I know you own a laser gun har har_ '

Mark remembers Jay playing with her phone in the car. ' _U texting with the kid?_ ' he writes out, and then realizes his eggs are burning. At this point, he's used to it enough to almost like his food this way.

Dustin replies within seconds. ' _Be careful. she's too smart for her own good. don't let her push you around._ '

Mark doesn't reply to that one. He's not good at figuring out what people aren't saying, but even he can see the implications in this. He eats his eggs slowly and tries to decide if he even wants them to stay long enough to give her the opportunity to try. Dustin obviously expects this to end in a big group hug, but Mark's not the optimist Dustin is. And he can read Eduardo pretty well, even after all this time. He already knows Eduardo's not going to make this easy.

  
  
\- - - - -

[Picture of Jay](http://photobasket.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/218556.jpg).  
  
---


	2. Chapter 2

  
When Mark gets up to go on his morning run the next day, the smell of coffee is wafting through the house. Eduardo's in the kitchen, dressed in a dark-blue suit that stretches across his ass and chest so perfectly it must be custom-tailored. He's standing by the counter, reading a newspaper and alternately sipping coffee and taking a bite out of his sandwich. There is more coffee on the kitchen table and a plate full of sandwiches. Mark rubs the sand out of his eyes and indulges a little longer in the fuzzy feeling of domesticity at the image of Eduardo in his kitchen, getting ready for work.

When he finally steps into the doorway, Eduardo looks up. He's pressing his lips together to hide a smile when he says, "You look - ah..."

"Like I just crawled out of bed at seven in the morning?" Mark finishes, taking a cup. The coffee is really good. "Did you make this? I don't remember having any in the house."

Eduardo looks down guiltily. "I borrowed your car and went to get some groceries. I didn't want Jay to wake up to Red Bull and instant noodles."

"I didn't think about that." Mark blinks. "Kids need food and stuff. Shit. Sorry, I should have gone last night."

"Mark -"

"Yeah?"

Eduardo looks exasperated. "You can't do that."

"What?"

"That. You don't need to - you can't do that, okay."

Mark doesn't know what that means, so he just shrugs. He tugs his pyjama pants up and stares into his cup, stomach rolling. "Okay."

"Okay," Eduardo breathes. "Okay." Then he catches Mark's gaze. "Thanks for letting us stay here."

"Yeah."

"And about Jay - we talked, and she promises she won't touch anything while you're at work. She has her computer with her, so if you leave her the wifi password, she can keep herself busy until I come back to get her in a couple hours."

Mark blinks. "What?"

"I know it's - I should take her with me, but she really hates waiting around while I'm in a meeting."

"No, I meant, I'm not going into work. I can work from here. She can play. In the living room. If that's all right with you."

Eduardo stares at him, the second time Mark has seen him at a complete loss for words in this short amount of time. "Mark," he says.

Mark tilts his head. Then he looks at his watch. "You're going to be late if your meeting's at eight. Traffic to San Francisco is a nightmare."

"The cab's not here yet," Eduardo says.

Mark takes another sip of his coffee. "Why would you call a cab? I've got a car."

"Oh." Eduardo's expression is pained. "Look, I appreciate it, I really do, but. Remember when I said there's stuff you can't do?"

"Yeah."

"This is another one of those things."

Mark stares down into the now empty bottom of his cup. "You wouldn’t have any problem taking Dustin's car if he offered," he finally prods.

There's a bout of silence, and then Eduardo says, "Yes. But Dustin's my friend."

Mark nods. He puts down the coffee, turns around, and leaves the kitchen. He doesn't have an answer for that.

  
\- - - - -

  
It's past eleven when Mark hears footsteps tiptoe past the living room and into the kitchen. A few minutes later, Jay enters with a plate of sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. She hesitates for a moment before she catches his eye and comes to sit down on the floor near him. "Morning," she says around a bite.

Mark grunts in reply and goes back to coding. He knows Jay has been awake for some time, playing around on the internet. He figures she can do that some more until he's done.

She takes the hint. She eats in silence, and then, watching him for a reaction, moves towards his video game collection. Mark keeps her in his periphery and only gives his full concentration back to his computer when he sees that she picked a game that Eduardo won't behead him for.

He comes back up after an hour, new update almost done. Later, he'll have it go through check-ups and testing, but for now, this will have to do. When he looks at the flat screen, she's playing the new Civilization edition, the one that's not out in stores yet. She's gotten pretty far in the hour she had, from what he can see.

"You should have hurried up the military development," he points out.

"Don't think so," she says. "Got twelve minutes before anything happens there."

"How'd you know?"

"The game's programmed to trigger at certain - oh hell, no. What - damn." Jay scrambles for the pause button. On the screen, an enemy army has just attacked her outer defenses. She turns to Mark accusingly. "That's unfair!"

Mark grins. "It's a new code. Not as easy to beat; the game rhythm is based off a different algorithm."

"Huh." Jay puts the controller down and turns to him fully, looking curious. "I'll try to figure it out later. Do you know when Wardo'll be back?"

"He said a couple hours."

"Are you babysitting me until then?"

Mark sees no point in lying about it. "Yes."

Jay rolls her eyes but doesn't protest. "Are you going to play, then?" She changes consoles and holds a Wii remote up to him. "I'll kick your ass at Mario Kart."

"You wish," Mark says.

She doesn't, but that's only because Mark has about ten years of practice on her. After the second lost game, she wants three out of five. She's like Wardo that way, Mark thinks, unable to take defeat, wanting more even though she must know she can't win.

One thing keeps nagging at the back of his mind throughout their playtime, so while she's starting up a new round, he finally gives in and asks. "Where's your mom?"

Jay doesn't seem surprised at the question. "Dead," she says, voice calm. "Couple years ago."

Mark blinks, then nods slowly. He'd figured out there couldn't be a second parent in the picture. Eduardo wouldn't have taken her along if there was.

"They didn't date, if you're wondering," Jay adds. "Or if they did, Wardo didn't tell me. I think mom always thought he was pretty gay, so."

Mark smirks.

"Oh, she thought you were, too, don't worry." Jay smirks back at him insolently.

Mark's amusement vanishes. "What do I have to do with anything?"

"They've been best friends since I was a baby. I've heard about you over the years. My mom certainly heard a lot about you. Mostly how big of an asshole you were. No offense."

"None taken," Mark says, and it’s true. He knows what people - what Eduardo thinks of him. He doesn't lose sleep over it anymore. Mostly he wonders whether Eduardo knows what kind of language the kid uses. "How old are you?"

"Thirteen," she says. Then she ducks her head. "In a month, anyway."

Mark nods. He takes the Wiimote back and switches the console off. "You should go do your homework." He doesn't offer her the password, since she's already got it.

Jay gets up and says, "I'm not sure why you're doing this."

It's one of the things Mark appreciates about kids. Most of the time, when they have an opinion on something, they just say it. No code, no hidden meaning. They expect the same courtesy in return, of course, and Mark's really good at that, too, so he doesn't play dumb. "I'm not sure why, either."

"If you wanted him back," she says. "I'd help. I want him to be happy, too. Right now, though, I can't tell if you're an asshole who broke his heart once, but really, you want to spend the rest of your life with him, or the kind who'll break his heart again."

"Because those are my only two options," Mark mocks, lip curling.

Jay shrugs. "Don't know you yet, so yeah. Right now they are." But apparently, she's not in the mood for homework, because instead of leaving, she turns big brown eyes on him and beams. "So. How about we make pancakes for lunch?"

  
\- - - - -

  
"I don't think -"

"You're doing great," Jay insists. "Just keep beating them."

Mark sighs. This is so not what he signed up for when he agreed to pancakes after an extended round of begging. He has no idea how she managed to inherit Eduardo's puppy eyes.

"Harder," she says.

"You are not the boss of me," Mark hears himself say and then thinks he must be regressing in her company.

She points her spatula at him and narrows her eyes. "Since you have never made pancakes - really, I have never met a pancake virgin your age before - I am so the boss of you. Now beat. Harder."

Mark is of half a mind to shove the bowl at her and tell her to beat them herself if she wants them so fucking well-beaten, the little sadist, but she just turns around on him and measures a cup of sugar and two cups of flour, half of which gets on her shirt. Then she dumps the contents into the bowl. A cloud of flour rises, covering both of them in white powder.

"Great," she says. "Look what you did!"

"What I did?" Mark asks.

"You're too slow. The machine I have at home can take a bit of flour without whining."

The fun doesn't stop after that, either. When they're done, it's past midday and there is more batter on both of them than there is in pancake form. They get two each with strawberries and banana, since that's what's in Mark's pantry after Eduardo's shopping run.

"This isn't half bad," Jay judges when they're tucking in. An extra plate is sitting by the stove, waiting for Eduardo. Mark runs his fingers through his hair and finds little clumps of flour and butter in his curls. He doesn't complain, though. He has to admit, he didn't expect it to be such an experience.

Eduardo gets back just as they're finishing up. He looks exhausted, and stunned as he takes in the chaos. "What happened to the kitchen?" he asks, eyes wide.

Mark clears his throat. "Minor incident of cookery."

"It was pretty epic, actually, the way that one pan blew up -"

"What?"

"I wonder what Mark cooked in it before. But anyway, we made pancakes!" Jay points to the plate. "Mark even remembered to make you some as well."

Mark stares at her, feeling himself flush, especially when Eduardo says, "Thanks," warmth coloring his voice. Mark's face turns hotter. Then Eduardo turns to Jay. "I thought we agreed we were going out for lunch to give Mark some space?"

Jay shrugs. "I got hungry." She picks at the last bit of pancake.

Mark knows for a fact that this is a lie; a hungry person would never have wasted so much time teaching him the subtleties of beating eggs. But he doesn't mention it because he still hasn't figured out how the two of them operate around each other. And if Mark can see it, Eduardo probably knows what she's up to; it's not like he's stupid.

Eduardo just sighs and doesn't call her out on it. "Jay and I will clean this up," he tells Mark, gesturing at the mess. "I'm sure you have more important things to do."

Which is true and a very good point. Mark stands up and heads out without another word. But as he leaves, he can't kick the feeling that he just got uninvited from his own kitchen party. It's not a good feeling.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark goes to the office. Everything's fine, no one's having a party there either, and the site's stable. He meets with finance and press, schedules some events with his assistant, and then he codes for a while before he realizes that he can't get into it, can't wire in completely. He's distracted. He keeps wondering what Eduardo might be doing, if he's spending the rest of the day with Jay, hanging out downtown, or if he has another meeting, taking her with him this time. Eduardo didn't mention anything like that, but he sounds like he's busy.

Mark's still having trouble wrapping his head around the fact that Wardo has a kid now, that he took that kind of responsibility on himself, at this age. Mark can't imagine being tied down like that, not permanently; and he's not even travelling much, or doing much beside sitting around working on his computer. But having a kid, it's like having someone want your attention all the time. It sounds exhausting.

When Ashley drops by his office, getting a signature from him, he stops her on her way out. She's a woman, he reasons. Maybe she can tell him all of the things he's missing. "You know a lot about kids, right?" he asks her.

Ashley gives him a look. She's in her mid-twenties; she finished her college degree a couple years ago. "I speak five languages," she says finally. "And I know that I wouldn't be able to get through to one in any of them."

"Oh," Mark says. "Does that mean you don't want kids?"

She hesitates, then says, "I don't think I do, actually." She waits a beat."Why, are you thinking about having one?"

Mark almost falls out of his chair. "What? No! What would I do with one? I'd forget to water it, and it would die."

She laughs. "Yeah. Seeing as I water your plants, I can see that happening." She heads out, but stops by the door one more time. "For what it's worth," she says slowly. "I think you'd take very good care of a child if it came down to it."

It's Mark's turn to stare at her like she's gone off the deep end.

Ashley shrugs gracefully. "Facebook's like a kid to you, right? And you take great care of everything Facebook. Especially your people. Voting you Asshole of the Year every year is sort of our way to show that we care."

Mark stares after her as she leaves, surprised. His ears feel hot.

  
\- - - - -

  
When Mark gets back to the house, it's empty. Mark tells himself it's stupid to be disappointed; he's been coming back to an empty house for a long time now. It's nothing new. But he was maybe hoping that Eduardo might share his couch tonight to watch a movie from Mark's collection, just a hint that he might want to spend some time together.

There are two new messages on his phone. It hasn't seen such a workout since the early days.

' _We're at Dustin's, come?_ ' the first one reads, from Jay.

The second one's from Dustin. ' _If you're not drowning yourself in code, you should drop by. The wife wants to see you._ ' Mark rolls his eyes. Dustin's not nearly as clever as he thinks he is with his double entendres.

He looks at the clock. It's just past six. He wars with the desire to go, just to see what it's like, what a reunion would look like, even though Chris isn’t there. Most people would expect him to go and crash the party without a second thought, but Mark does have a little sensitivity. If not for them, at least for himself. He knows it would turn out awkward and uncomfortable, and Eduardo might resent him even more, since he sees their shared friends far too rarely as it is. Mark doesn't want Eduardo to resent him. Mark never wanted Eduardo to hate him, never wanted - he wants a best friend, he wants Eduardo to be there for him. He wants Wardo. But Mark can't have him, and there's really no use in torturing himself over it.

It's Thursday. His art class starts at six thirty, so he grabs a bag, stuffs it with his supplies, and heads out to the campus instead. They'll be fine without him, and he'll be fine on his own, like he always is.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark has never been particularly unhappy about not having many friends. He doesn't need people, not in the way most people seem to need them. He has a few people he doesn't want to lose contact with, but it's all right to spend weeks at a time not seeing them. He has his computer and a few guys who he codes funny shit with that they can unleash on the internet.

His therapist once asked why he doesn't have any female friends, but at the time Mark didn't care and didn't want to think about it. "Girls just don't like me very much," he said in reply. "Never have."

"You're making it very easy for yourself, claiming that particular inability to be innate, don't you think?" was his therapist's answer to that. It reminded him of that lawyer from the depositions. She was nice, Mark thinks. Not like the girls from high school or college who thought he was the biggest loser on the planet. But then, she was post-Facebook already.

It's not easy for him to make new friends but art class is different. It's not college-based, so it's not filled with college kids. They're all adults here, nine people, and none of them care who he is, not beyond what he can put on the canvas. Most of them smoke weed in the halls and leave with paint stains on their shirts.

Zahra is the first maybe girl friend Mark's ever had, though he doesn't know if she'd call them friends. Sometimes, she texts him about the state of the Great Barrier Reef or about salmon, and she starts every one of them with 'Hey moonface.' Most of the time, she sits next to him in class, with her colorful beads in her black hair and ridiculous pink glasses, and makes sarcastic, biting comments about his art.

Today, they're doing pencil sketches of facial emotions. They do a variation on this theme once a month, and Mark always struggles while Zahra has the easiest time of it. She's made one of the other girls cry once with her portrait of a lonely old woman. When he scraps his third attempt at an identity-less person he saw on the street today, she leans over and says, "Your persistent suckitude at this continues to amaze me."

"Fuck off," Mark says.

Zahra grins.

Their instructor looks over at them, mouthing, "Language!" There's not much else she can do, since there are no grades to be given. It's just everyone's own brand of perfectionism to measure up to, which almost makes it worse.

Mark's phone buzzes as he's contemplating what to do next. The number is one he doesn't know; it makes him buzz with anticipation.

' _I don't want to presume_ ', it says, wooden enough to give Eduardo away. ' _But if you're staying away because of me, you should come. I wouldn't mind._ '

A second later, there’s another message: ' _This was me btw. Eduardo._ '

"Who's that from?" Zahra asks, as she finishes a line with flourish. A curly-haired boy stares back from her page, overjoyed with happiness.

Mark wonders if it's her little brother. "No one," he says. He puts his phone away.

Zahra snorts. "You made a face. You never make faces."

"I didn't make a face."

"If you could put that face on paper, you wouldn’t fail the assignment."

Mark gives her a blank stare.

"Just sayin'," she smirks, holding her pencil up.

Mark shrugs. "Who's that?" He points at the sketch.

"My favorite baby cousin," she says.

She always does this, drawing family, friends, lovers. Sometimes, she draws characters from her stories. It makes him envious, how she can do it. Mark knows his technique is good. He's been practicing ever since freshman year. Whenever he's lost in thought, he catches himself doodling or sketching, but he doesn't have stories. He doesn't have people's faces that laugh or are lonely.

"You should draw that person," Zahra says.

"What?"

"The person who texted you. If they make you feel enough that you emote at your phone -"

"I didn't."

"- then some of it has to stick to the page."

"It's not that easy," he says and starts sketching another nameless face.

She lets it go. She never pushes, which is nice. She just goes back to her own drawing, softening the edges.

When the time is up, Mark has failed the assignment again.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark goes out for drinks with Zahra and her friend after art class, so when he gets back to the house, it's midnight. The TV is on in the living room. He takes off his shoes and pads over. It's Eduardo, of course, but Jay's not sitting with him. The lights are out, and it's dark except for the flickering of the screen. Eduardo's eyes are closed, and he's breathing softly. He's still wearing his suit. Maybe he never changes out of it except for transpacific flights.

Mark squats down in front of the couch and traces Wardo's features with his eyes, feeling something hot burn in his chest at the thought that he could touch those lips with his fingers, with his own mouth. It would probably earn him a punch and another lifetime of wrath, but he _could_.

He'd been an idiot in college, not realizing what was going on between them. He'd been nineteen and pig-ignorant about everything, and Chris hadn't come out to him yet, which had probably been for the better. Mark has no idea how his nineteen-year-old self would have reacted. He has a feeling it might have lost him another friend.

He's not Chris; he's not sure _what_ he is, sexually, or if he's anything. He doesn't think it matters, really, because nice as sex is, it never leaves him wanting more. Not like Facebook does, like coding does. He wonders if that's why Eduardo never said anything.

His therapist once asked him what he thought Eduardo's worst quality was. Mark could have said a lot of things: his daddy issues, his occasional bouts of childish temper, his jealous insecurities. But ultimately, for Mark, it was always the way Eduardo looked at him like he wasn't enough. Like he was lacking in some capacity, like he was disappointing because he wasn't what Eduardo wanted him to be.

When Eduardo makes a little sound and moves, mashing his cheek against the couch cushion, his hair messy, Mark gently touches his knee and says, "Hey, Wardo."

"Yeah?" Eduardo murmurs.

"You shouldn't sleep on the couch," Mark tells him softly. "Your neck will cramp and then you'll be grumpy all day."

Eduardo smiles sleepily. He's blinking dreams out of his eyes when he says, "Gonna go to my room soon. Is Dustin asleep already?"

Mark clears his throat. "I hope you left Dustin at his house."

"Oh." Eduardo blinks a few more times. His hand comes up, and he rubs the bridge of his nose, getting himself together. "Sorry. I - had a dream. Sorry."

"It's okay."

Eduardo sits up straighter, fingers through his hair, straightening his clothes even though they're beyond hope. Mark starts to get up, ready to leave him and go to bed. It's not too late, so he can get some work done before he falls asleep, but Eduardo -

"Why didn't you come?" Eduardo asks suddenly.

Mark stops. "What?"

"To Dustin's place. We got Mexican food. We waited, but you never replied."

Mark keeps his face impassive. "I didn't think you'd want me there." His voice comes out sharper than he intended, but it's too late. "I'm not your friend, remember?"

Eduardo bites his lip and looks at his lap. "I'm sorry I said that," he says. "I shouldn't have said that."

"To my face," Mark adds, his lips curling in disdain. "But you meant it anyway."

"Can you blame me?" Eduardo snaps. His voice rises in pitch but not in volume. "I can read between the lines, Mark. Those lines I signed like the biggest fucking idiot on the planet, they spelled out pretty clearly that you don't want me as your friend, don't you think?"

"I didn't say that," Mark insists. "I never said that."

"Yeah, well," Eduardo snorts. "Guess what, sometimes actions speak louder than words. Or intentions. Or whatever else you think you have going for you in that particular debate. Which I'm not having again, by the way."

"You started it," Mark says.

"I'm not twelve," Eduardo says. "I'm going to go to bed." He gets up, and Mark doesn't ask him to come back. When Eduardo's almost out of the door, he adds, "We'll be leaving your house tomorrow. Your generosity is appreciated, but this was not a good idea."

Mark doesn't say anything, and Eduardo leaves. The burn is still there, but it hurts now. He has no idea how to make it better. Not when Eduardo doesn't seem to want to, anyway.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark doesn't sleep that night. He works until his eyes threaten to fall shut. When he can't feel his fingers anymore, he gets up, drinks lukewarm beer, and holds his head under cold water to get rid of the taste in his mouth. By the time morning dawns, he's figured out how Jay hacked into Facebook and has set up a program outline that will prevent anyone from doing it her way again. He's also removed Dustin's mainframe access. He should have done it when Dustin left the company. There are other access plans, though, so it's better to be safe than sorry. Jay's done Facebook a service by discovering the security loophole, not that he's going to tell her. His tech guys will be delighted by an impromptu meeting later in the morning.

Around six fifteen, someone logs into his system. Jay's awake. It draws him out, makes him shut off the code in his head and come down from the high. He feels like someone's put him through a grinder. It's not normal; he never used to feel so tired after one night of programming. Back when he wrote Facebook, he could go days without sleep.

Mark puts away the computer with a sigh, before he patters downstairs. He puts on coffee, drinks two cups, makes a sandwich for himself and a few more for when the kid inevitably gets hungry. He tries not to think of Eduardo. The package Jay sent is a good distraction, hidden in one of the bottom drawers. He considers taking it out, maybe giving it all back to Eduardo when they leave later.

He's still thinking about it when Jay walks into the kitchen, wearing cute pink pyjamas with dancing penguins. Her hair looks crazy, just like Eduardo's used to in the mornings. "I was going to challenge you to a hacker duel," she mutters and slips onto one of the chairs. "But you logged out before I could ping you."

Mark gives her an amused smile. "Wouldn't have taken you up on it. I hate to lose." She narrows her eyes at him, and Mark shrugs. "Security's not my strong suit. I'm more into creative programming. You're the hacker."

Jay reaches for one of the sandwiches and takes a bite. She talks while she chews, says, "You're dumb. I should start calling you Mr. Zuckerberg again. You made Eduardo cry."

Mark flinches inwardly. "I - really?" he asks, glaring at the floor.

"No," Jay says. "I lied. Did it make you feel bad?" It makes Mark feel angry, mostly, but she's not looking at him maliciously. She's looking at him like she's testing him. "Because you're good at not showing what you feel, so I can't tell," she explains. "With Eduardo, it's easy. I let a tear fall and he looks like he's going to kill himself to make it better."

Mark still feels angry, but also protective, which is new. "You shouldn't," he starts.

Jay interrupts, says, "Pot. Kettle."

He wants to tell her that it's different because she's Wardo's kid. No matter what, Eduardo can never run off and just leave her behind if she hurts him, like he did with Mark. But then, her manipulations are far more benign than his were back in college and far less selfish.

Jay finishes her sandwich and hops off her chair, opens the fridge. She takes the bottle of orange juice and leans against the counter. She suddenly looks very young and very tired. "I miss my mom," she says. Her eyes are hidden by her hair.

Mark has no idea what to say to that.

"It's like." She hesitates. "It's like I - we can't get her back, right? She's gone. I don't - it's so stupid, because Wardo can get you back. Because you're always just here." She gives him a look. "So don't fuck it up."

Mark hunches his shoulders. He can't promise that. It's all so fucked up already, and he doesn't know if it's for him to fix, at this point.

  
\- - - - -

  
They practice fencing together with his Kinnect, and he improves the software he wrote with her feedback. No one he knows fences, so he never has direct input unless he forces someone from work to stand in for him, and he hates doing that. It's not what he pays them for. She's horrible at the sport, unfortunately, but she still thinks it's fun. Mark doesn't get that; he hates being bad at anything. She does have good basics, however, so it's good enough for their programming purposes.

It's only when she sits down next to him and suggests a few lines of code that he realizes her code is completely incompatible with his. They're both messy coders when on the fly. Dustin used to go nuts trying to decipher what Mark was doing with lines upon lines of rough draft, no annotations, no clear structure besides the one in his head. But Mark _can_ code cleanly. It's just that more often than not, he chooses not to.

"Who taught you?" he asks her when he realizes that she can't.

She looks up at that. She seems to get that he's actually interested, because she gives him a small, almost grateful smile. "Wardo had a lot to do with it. He kept buying me the newest tech. I vaguely remember my fifth birthday, because the cake made me throw up so much. He got me this little robot. To make it work, you had to program into it what you wanted it to do. Apparently, I was really good at it, because then my mom bought me one of those kid laptops a few weeks later. My mom was a programmer, too, did you know?"

There's a vague expression of sadness on her face, but she doesn't look like she's going to cry, so Mark says, "No. I didn't."

Jay's tapping her feet, pulling stray strands of wool from her socks when she says, "More into spacecraft, though. I know all about planes and rocket ships. Maybe I'll be an astronaut when I grow up. Maybe I'll be so dangerous when I'm older that they'll want to get rid of me so badly, they'll let me fly into space."

Mark smiles down at his screen. "Probably. You could hack yourself on the list of candidates for the next trip."

"Yeah." Jay grins. "Probably. Mom would like that." She pushes her hair out of her face and continues, "So then Eduardo taught me tons of math, and my mom taught me some code, but mostly, I just went on the internet and there were a lot of helpful people."

Mark nods. He knows what that's like. When she's silent for a little while longer, he figures she's done sharing and asks, "Wanna try this again?"

"Yes!" she says, and hops to her feet. She's immediately enthusiastic again, swinging from one mood to the next.

An hour flies by, then another. It's only when Eduardo leans against the doorframe to the living room, clearing his throat, that Jay turns and says, "Morning, dad," with a broad smile. "We're ready to conquer the US, I think."

Eduardo gives her a weak smile. "That's great, sweetheart. Did you eat breakfast?"

"Did." She nods. "Mark made coffee for you, but it's probably cold now."

"I'll go out to buy -"

"Jesus Christ, you can make some more fucking coffee," Mark interrupts, voice loud, a wave of irrational anger rolling over him because why does Eduardo have to be so stupid about this?

The words echo in the silence as Eduardo stiffens. Mark closes his eyes, giving himself the weakness for barely a second before he's got himself back under control. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

Eduardo deflates. "It's fine," he says. He sounds tired, too. "You're on edge. We'll be out of here in a few minutes, don't worry."

"No!" Jay protests. "No, we were having fun!"

"Jay, we talked about this. Mark wants his house back to himself."

Mark turns to his computer and bites the insides of his cheek to keep himself from snapping at Eduardo for making up things he's never said. It's not like it'll change Wardo's mind.

"But dad -"

"Go pack your things, Jay. Now."

And this is a side Mark hasn't seen from Eduardo before. His voice is steely and pissed, but it’s not like when he gets pissed at Mark. When he's angry at Mark, he's always hurt at the same time. He's vulnerable and pained, and this is different. Authoritative. Mark stares at his screen with horror, realizing it's turning him on.

"Mark," Jay tries, disrupting his train of thought. The tension in the room ricochets up another notch.

"It's fine," Mark says, trying not to pick sides. "We were done with this anyway."

"But -"

The frustration on her face is so obvious, he can almost see her form the tears to get her way. It's strangely sweet. He feels himself waver. "You helped a lot," he relents. "If you wanted, we could rewrite the code clean, later," he offers. He looks at Eduardo, hesitant, trying to see whether he's overstepping. "If it's okay with you. Jay could - uh. She could visit me at the office when you've got work stuff to do? I'll get Dustin to give her a ride from the hotel. It wouldn't be a bother; he never works anyway."

Eduardo is softening, looks like he can't decide how bad an idea this actually is. It makes sense. On one hand, Mark could be a bad influence. Except there's no evidence that Mark has ever corrupted innocent children before and on the other hand, Mark's a genius programmer. Eduardo's clearly in over his head trying to get Jay to stay on the legal side of the law.

If the tension weren't so thick, Mark would say the emotional seesaw that is openly playing out on Eduardo's face is funny and cute. Actually, it's still pretty funny and cute, despite the tension. Mark ducks his head and feels the corners of his lips threaten to curl up in a smile.

"Fine," Eduardo gives in. "Fine, I - this afternoon, all right? After lunch. I have a shareholder meeting at another company. It'll take forever. I'm. Mark, I don't know what you're doing with this -"

"It's a good program." Mark shrugs. "If we manage a good pitch to the graphics guys from Zenga, get a story built around it, it could be huge. Everyone loves a good swordfight. Fence fight."

"I'm going to be a billionaire." Jay beams, heading over to give Eduardo a quick hug. "Just like Mark!"

Eduardo looks like he has no idea what to say to that, so he just glares at Mark like this is all his fault, turns on his heel, and stalks off towards the kitchen.

A few moments pass. Then Jay jumps and air-high-fives Mark over the back of the couch. "Yes!" she cheers. "We'll be moving back in with you in no time at all."

Mark stares at her, mouth moving, no words coming out.

"What?" she asks with an innocent blink. "I'll work on that part of the plan, and you work on how you'll get him to accept your marriage proposal. If we double-team him, he'll have no choice but to do whatever we want!"

"I heard that," Eduardo says loudly from the hallway, coffee in hand. He comes back into view. "And the answer is no."

Jay's face flames.

"Well, shit," Mark deadpans. "I guess we won't be going ring-shopping today, after all."

Eduardo rolls his eyes, but there's a small smile lurking around his mouth. Mark bites his lip.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark texts Dustin with his assignment then goes to the office. There are a few glances from people who are surprised to see he's just now coming in, but no one bothers him. He heads straight into his office and wires in. After that, only Ashley and her signature-needing ninja skills can get him to raise one hand from his keyboard to grab a pen.

At two pm, Dustin drops Jay off. She's clutching her laptop bag to her chest, hair covering half her face as she looks around curiously. "This is more like it," she says finally, sounding pleased.

"Like what?"

"Like how I imagined your house," she says.

Dustin snorts. "That's because he basically lives here. Unless he has company."

Jay turns to Mark, her gaze suddenly sharp. "What sort of company?"

"The company of annoying little girls who don't know when to keep their hands out of metaphorical cookie jars," Dustin tells her. "Now, shoo, go sit on the couch while the grown-ups talk, will you?"

"Yeah, Dustin." Mark smirks. "Go sit on the couch while the grown-ups talk."

"Piss off." Dustin grins back.

Jay grumbles, rolls her eyes, and says, "Like I don’t have better things to do."

"Why didn't you come to the party last night?" Dustin asks Mark, when Jay's headed off towards the couch, unpacking her laptop to get started on what Mark is almost sure is a plan destroy his company from the inside. He'll have to check up on her later.

"No time," he says absently. "Did you see Eduardo when you picked her up?"

"Yeah, he was just leaving. I also saw Eduardo when he came over for dinner last night. And you might have, too, if you weren't a fucking coward."

"I was busy," Mark says. "Anyway, it wouldn't have been a good idea."

"I noticed," Dustin says. He leans against Mark's desk, toes tapping against the wood. "He moved to a hotel. What'd you do?"

"Nothing. Just... same old stuff."

"How hard can it be to just apologize?" Dustin says. "I know you know how that goes. I've heard you say sorry to random people you don't give a shit about. But not to Eduardo. You're a fucking dick, man."

"So I hear." It never makes him feel good about himself when he is told that, though he never shows. It only hurts for a minute or so anyway, and then he remembers that it's that or being a hypocrite, and he'd rather be a dick.

"Anyway, remember how I'm not your personal chauffeur?"

Mark gives him another tiny smirk. "But it's not like you have anything else to do."

"Hey," Dustin says and makes a face. "Like you're doing anything more productive than writing love letters to Eduardo in your code, don’t lie to me, I know how you work." He clutches his chest like he's been shot.

Mark snorts and turns back to his laptop. "Fuck you."

"Anyway, Chris says to say hello and that he's coming out soon to see if we're all behaving ourselves. He also said you should call him so that he can give you shit about your absolutely abysmal people skills, specifically when it comes to Eduardo." Dustin grins. "He wants to fix things. So be prepared for a gaytervention -"

"A what?"

"Excuse me for forgetting you don't enjoy the ridiculosity that is a classic first-season Glee episode. A gaytervention is a gay intervention."

"It was a rhetorical question. Dustin, can you go away now?" Mark looks up from his laptop. "You're wasting my time."

"Will you drop by this weekend? Chris is flying in Saturday night, so Sunday would be best. Dinner? He misses you."

Mark bites his lip and feels his stomach warm at the thought. He nods.

"Great. I'll make sure he brings those little cocoa cakes his mum bakes."

"Good. Now go away."

"All right, all right, I'm going. Bye bye, baby girl." He waves suavely at Jay. "Don't crash Facebook again, will you?"

"I'm working on crashing everything but Facebook next," Jay says cheekily.

Dustin grins and leaves.

"I need a few more minutes for this," Mark mutters at his laptop, almost back under.

"It's fine," she tells him. She's leaning against the backrest of his couch, laptop bouncing on her knees. "I'm about to crack your main internal security password, so I need a few more minutes, too."

Mark nods and leaves her to it. Hopefully she won't really implode the internet. His security guys have been getting smug lately, though; maybe she can mortify them some more. He grins and goes back to his coding.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark stays wired in for half an hour by himself then spends two hours with Jay cleaning up the fencing code. After that, she goes back to what she does online when she's not hacking - apparently, stalking her latest celebrity crush on Twitter - and Mark figures he has another hour or so to program a short update for Facebook before Eduardo comes to get her.

Around six, there's a sudden sharp drop in overall productivity. Since Mark monitors all internal server access and running processes from the computer next to his laptop, it immediately jerks him out of his headspace. Usually it only happens around three thirty, during shift change.

He looks up. Ashley is working on her computer, as is the rest of the floor. And then Eduardo comes into sight. He's holding himself like he's afraid of getting shot. Mark understands why no one's working anymore. He can practically see it happen, the elbowing each other into a state of drop-everything-and-freeze as his work force spots the infiltrator. Possibly, Mark should have thought about this when he declared Facebook an Eduardo-free zone. He's under no illusion; all his employees know the story and talk about it. But they also think he's magic and hears everything, so they don't talk about it _in_ the building, which explains the sudden, all-encompassing silence.

Mark makes a decision. He stands up, catches Eduardo's gaze, and waves awkwardly in greeting. Wardo looks surprised for a split second, before he manages to force a half-smile and his shoulders relax a tiny amount. Mark feels the sharp weight in his stomach topple.

Outside, Ashley has also noticed what's going on. She closes her mouth a heartbeat after recognition sets in, transformed back to the professional Mark knows and appreciates. She greets Eduardo warmly, more warmly than Mark has probably managed to greet anyone in his life. From the expression on her face, Mark almost expects them to hug. Eduardo doesn't look averse to the idea, sheepish grin on his face.

Mark opens the doors. Behind him, Jay's fingers never stop rattling the keys.

"Hey, Mark," Eduardo says. "Hey, Jay."

"Hey," Mark says, giving him another short wave. Everyone on the floor is staring at them, possibly expecting a show-down. He's surprised no one is blasting that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly tune from their loudspeakers. Ever since Dustin's left, the number of jokes that are actually funny has taken a drastic nosedive.

"Um, hey," Eduardo says again. He fidgets. "Can we - I mean. Jay? We're leaving?"

Jay doesn't look up.

"Jay."

"Gimme ten minutes," she mumbles. "If I can just -"

"What're you doing?" Eduardo asks, suspicious.

"If I can just get into this thing, I might be able to find out where Logan Lerman lives," she says.

"Who?" Eduardo mouths.

Mark shrugs. Behind him, Ashley snickers. "He's an actor. Sexy kid."

"Since I'm already here, and he's having a party." Jay grins at her laptop. "Dustin said he'd take me if I find out where it's at."

"No, he won’t," Eduardo protests.

"He's a fan." Jay grins wider. "We can go stan Logan together."

"Jay -"

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding, geez. I'm just updating my blog. My minions have been yearning for new orders."

Eduardo breathes out. "Fine. You know what, just - do what you have to do. I'll wait."

"You should take Mark to get some food. He hasn't eaten all day."

"I've eaten!" Mark protests.

"No, he hasn't," Ashley chimes in. She's still there, watching it all unfold with wide-eyed glee. "A granola bar is not food. Go eat something, Mark. I'll keep an eye on the devil child."

"Hey," Eduardo says, "that's my devil child you're talking about." But they're grinning at each other, and of course, they'd get along from the first second, Mark thinks, watching them with what he hopes is an impassive face that conceals all of his impulses to fire Ashley immediately for looking at Eduardo like that.

"But all right," Eduardo adds. "I could use a snack. Mark?"

"What?"

"I'm taking you to get food."

"Really?" Mark frowns, remembering last night, and this morning, and just... "Is that a good idea?"

Eduardo rolls his eyes. "I'm not going to poison you, if that's what you're afraid of. Jay, do you want me to get you something?"

"Cheese crackers," she mutters, staring at the computer screen intently. "Thanks, Wardo."

"Why does she get to stay in?" Mark asks.

"Have fun, guys." Ashley cuts him off with a grin, slipping a credit card into Mark's jeans pocket as she pushes him out of his office and after Eduardo.

The whole floor is suddenly fascinated by whatever is happening on their screens. Not a single head is up as they walk down the hallway; Mark's fairly sure once they're out of the building, it'll be like a beehive in there, but thankfully he won't be subjected to it. He wonders if anyone's made the connection to Jay yet.

He glances at Eduardo's profile, the hidden smile in the twist of his lips, and wonders if something good happened. He wonders if Eduardo will smile like that again because of him someday soon.

Mark turns his head away, stares ahead, and realizes he wants to make that happen. He wishes he knew how; he wishes he knew if Eduardo would want to.

  
\- - - - -

  
Once they're outside the Facebook building, Eduardo stops and looks at Mark expectantly. It's obvious he has no idea where to go, which is not a big surprise. He's not a regular guest. Mark doesn't go out a lot, either, but he's been living here for years. Dustin used to drag him around, so Mark picks a salad-bar-slash-coffee-place off the main road, tucked between the usual student shops.

Eduardo seems to like it, judging by the look on his face when they sit down. "Do you come here often?" he asks, glancing around curiously.

"No," Mark says.

Eduardo blinks, then nods. They order. Eduardo orders more than Mark does, and then gives Mark a sneaky look from underneath his eyelashes. He's not half as subtle as he thinks he is. Jay probably learned that from him.

"Are you not mad at me anymore, then?" Mark finally asks. They've been sitting in silence for a while, and Eduardo doesn't look like he's going to speak. It's not that Mark can’t take silence, because he can. There are more things going on in his head at any particular moment than most people manage to get done in a week. But this is Eduardo, and Mark wants - Mark's trying to fix things.

"Be more specific," Eduardo says. There's a twitch to his mouth.

"You were mad last night," Mark tries again. "You seem better today."

"I had a good meeting. Business is going well. Jay's grandparents called this morning, and they're willing to relocate for us, to make things easier. I was really worried they wouldn't."

"Relocate?" Mark asks.

Their food arrives. He gets his salad; Eduardo gives him a look and moves the bowl of soup and plate of sandwiches towards him. Apparently, some things will never change. Eduardo gets the second salad for himself and takes up his fork.

"There's been some changes at work," Eduardo says carefully. "I'll be spending most of my time in the States, starting a few months from now, so we'll have to move. But I can't take care of Jay full-time. It’s a bit of a headache, since she's not old enough to spend so much time on her own. Her grandparents have been really helpful in Singapore, but I didn't want to burden them - well, anyway. You don't want to hear that."

"No, I." Mark glances down at his soup. "It's good. I'm glad you're getting things sorted out." He keeps his face carefully blank of the hope in his chest that blossoms at the thought of having Eduardo in the country again. "Are you - will you be staying in California?"

"We're not sure yet. Jay likes it here, but she also likes Florida. She only vetoed New York, which I wasn't seriously considering anyway, even though I'll be travelling back and forth between there and California." Eduardo makes a face. "Maybe we should pick in the middle. Nebraska?"

Mark nods. He doesn't think Eduardo actually wants an opinion, so he keeps quiet.

"Sorry, I'm boring you," Eduardo mutters and pushes some salad into his mouth.

"You're not," Mark insists. It's not the first time they've had this exchange. He's trying not to sound exasperated, but apparently it bleeds through, because Eduardo snorts. Mark decides to clear this up the only way he knows. "I'm an asshole, right?" he says and adds, before Eduardo can nod or protest, "Don't you think I'd tell you to your face if you were boring me? Believe me, I would."

Eduardo pierces a bit of salad with his fork. He's staring down at the table, which already tells Mark that whatever's going to come out of his mouth isn't easy for him to say.

"I wish I could show you," Eduardo finally murmurs. "I wish I had video of your face whenever you - whenever Sean was telling you things. And you could see it side-by-side with your face when I'm talking to you. I wish you could see that, and then you can tell me again how I'm supposed to think you give a fuck about anything I say."

The words make Mark feel queasy. He doesn't really want to eat anymore, but he knows Eduardo will get even more upset if he stops, so he doesn't. The silence is tense and unhealthy, his back in knots. His physiotherapist will have a field day and schedule another torture session. Mark shortly entertains the thought of having to choose between an hour of painful silence with Wardo or an hour of physio workout, and then he catches sight of Eduardo's expression and reevaluates.

"I didn't notice," he starts. He quickly finds himself at a loss for words, because Eduardo's not wrong - but he's still not getting it. There's a difference, but it's not about Sean, not like Eduardo thinks. "It was about Facebook," he says. "It wasn't Sean, he. I know I get different when it's about Facebook." Eduardo should know this; Mark has always thought that Eduardo should just _get it_ , and it keeps being a disappointment whenever he doesn't.

And sure enough, Eduardo says, "All right," but the look in his eyes says he still doesn't.

Mark casts his eyes around, trying to find something, anything that can make Wardo see. It's hard because Eduardo loves so much. Eduardo loves so many people, but he never loves them quite right. It never has that 'most important thing' about it, except maybe his father, but that's not something Mark will ever touch. And then Mark realizes that Eduardo actually does now.

"Your face changes when you talk about Jay," he blurts.

For a long moment, Eduardo stares at him, mouth open, before a furious flush rises to his cheeks. "Jay is a person," he snaps. "You did not just compare her to - to an internet site."

"It's not just a site," Mark insists. "I created it. I take care of it. It's an idea and a revolutionary change to the way we communicate -"

"It's not your child," Eduardo insists. The flush is going down again, but he still looks angry.

"It might as well be, with the amount of work and love and care I've put into it," Mark protests.

"It's not human."

"That doesn't matter." Mark doesn't lower his gaze when Eduardo scoffs. "You never understood that. You think everyone works like you work, but I'm not - I don't. I don't connect with people that way, not like you can, not. Not the same way."

"That's good to know," Eduardo says coldly. There's something drawn and hurt in his face now, something that wasn't there before, and Mark realizes that what he said could be taken the wrong way. "Bit late, at this point, but at least it explains why you had no problem screwing me over." He pushes his plate away and makes to leave.

"Don't go," Mark says. "Please."

When Eduardo hesitates, it only makes him look defeated. He says, "I just don't understand what this is supposed to be." He gestures between them. "That - you invited me home with you. You wanted. I don't know what. I'm probably reading this wrong, since apparently you're incapable of 'connecting'." Eduardo makes air quotes with his fingers sarcastically.

"That's not what I meant," Mark says, frustrated. "You're being irrational -"

"Oh, really."

It feels like sitting at that table in that smoky bar again, Erica looking at him with uncomprehending eyes while he talks himself deeper and deeper into trouble. He doesn't want Eduardo to leave, like she did. "I'm sorry," he tries. "Look, I worded that the wrong way, I didn't mean that I can't be friends with people. Or - or more."

Eduardo looks at him incredulously.

"And I am sorry that I hurt you with the share dilution. I didn't think - I had hoped you would understand that in order for Facebook to grow, shares had to be distributed amongst investors and -"

"You know what, fuck you," Eduardo says softly, narrowing his eyes. "I don't know what you were trying for, but I don't care for any apology that comes with a ribbon around its very convenient excuse. Especially when it's a pathetic excuse. But feel free to make yourself feel better about what you did." He gets up completely this time.

"Wardo."

"And don't call me that," Eduardo says. He doesn't look back, just pushes outside through the glass door and walks off down the street. There's money next to his plate, enough to cover both their meals. Mark didn't notice him putting it there.

There is a young couple sitting a table over, looking at him without any sense of discretion, so he rises from his chair as well. He didn't even get a chance to start on his salad.

"Sorry about your friend," a waitress says behind him, startling him. "Would you like me to wrap this up for you to take home?"

Mark looks out the window, but Eduardo's long gone. Then he looks back at the girl. "Yeah," he says. "Thanks." He'll be hungry in an hour or so. Might as well take the offer. They do have really good salads here.

When he gets back to Facebook, he's surprised to see Jay is still there. She's no longer in his office or at her computer; instead, she's standing next to one of his head programmers in his cubicle, nodding along as he points to things on his screen. She's laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. When Mark gets closer, he can see that they're looking at macros. Cat macros.

"You're fired," he tells Dave. "Facebook Rulebook -"

"- paragraph 22b, I know, no cat macros, but this one is hilarious, it's animated, look!"

Jay is giggling. Mark stares at the two of them. "I find myself missing the days when Dustin was playing practical jokes on people, and that scares me," he says.

"Mark," Jay says. "It's a ceiling cat from space!"

Mark shakes his head and moves on. A few minutes later, Jay tiptoes into his office. She's tugging on a strand of her hair and biting her lip. "Where's Wardo?" she asks slowly.

"Had to go somewhere," Mark replies, shrugging. It's not like he knows, so it's not a lie.

"Did you have a fight?"

Mark glances up from his screen. "A disagreement."

"So you had a fight."

Mark shrugs again. "He's not getting that I can have a meaningful relationship with an inanimate object. His problem, not mine." He tries to sound flippant and sarcastic, but it comes out more bitter than anticipated.

"Oh, that." Jay nods. "Yeah, he won't get that."

"Hm," Mark says.

"I should call Dustin then, huh," she murmurs. "Since Wardo won't come back up here now? Maybe we'll make it to Logan's house party after all -"

"Not a good idea," Mark says absently, and then he looks up when he realizes she was probably making a joke. She's half-smiling at him. "Look," he says. "I wasn't - I'm busy."

Jay's face falls. "I'll just hang out until someone picks me up, then," she says finally. Mark doesn't reply, and she turns around and heads out onto the floor, probably to bug a few more of his employees.

When the door falls shut behind her and he's finally left alone, Mark feels his shoulders relax. He doesn't want anyone bothering him for the rest of the day, just wire in, start work on a few of his newer projects. He doesn't want to think about anything else right now.

  
\- - - - -


	3. Chapter 3

"People lie," Mark says.

"What about?"

"All sorts of things, but specifically about apologies. I've been thinking about apologies. They never work, do they? It doesn't matter if you apologize or not, because the person you apologize to has to be willing to forgive you first. If they're not willing, the apology won't matter, they'll still hate you. And if they are willing, you don't need to apologize because they'll be your friend again anyway. It's all about what they want."

"You know, Mark, I've never known you to be so concerned about another person's feelings. We're definitely making progress."

"Funny. Didn't we establish a no-making-fun-of-Mark rule in my very first session?"

"You're right, I'm sorry. Next time, I'll make sure not to use humor to deliver a valuable life lesson."

"Still not funny."

"C'mon, it was a little funny. Humor aside, though, have you ever considered apologies from the point of view of the person who is apologizing?"

"I know the theories. It's supposed to be cathartic, builds self-respect and self-esteem. I've read the same textbooks as you have, and probably more."

"You're free to imagine it's an exam sort of situation, if that makes you feel better?"

Mark makes a face. "I don't think I want to talk about this anymore. Can we go back to discussing the benefits of introversion? I liked that."

"Maybe after you tell me what you feel, giving an apology to someone."

"Nothing."

"Ever?"

Mark bites his lip and twists his hands together in his pockets. He thinks back to Erica. It had felt like a weight on his chest, and then when she'd thrown the apology back in his face, like the weight was rising up his throat, making it hard to speak. "Embarrassed," he says honestly. "And hurt, I guess."

"It's a valid emotional reaction. One that the person who you think deserves an apology feels as well, about your actions."

"But I didn't do anything wrong! At least not the way he thinks I did."

"Maybe. But we've talked subjective reality before. I'm sure you remember. So look at it this way: Feeling embarrassed and hurt about an apology is not rational, is it?"

Mark frowns.

"So this person we're talking about can feel hurt and embarrassed about something, even if you don't believe he has a sensible reason for it."

The unspoken words rest heavy between them, the question whether Mark cares enough to do something about it.

  
\- - - - -

  
It's going on noon, and Saturday traffic is always the worst around this time, so it takes Mark almost an hour to get back to the house. He avoids thinking about anything until he's home; he knows all about the car accidents that will happen if he locks himself up in his head while driving. They've talked about Eduardo before, of course, and about subjectivity and points of view and empathy. It's not that Mark doesn't understand, on a rational level, but it's hard to _get_ sometimes. Then he remembers Jay's words about Eduardo, ' _He won't get that_ ', and maybe they're more similar than they think, after all.

At home, Mark makes himself a tuna sandwich and flops down on the couch, switching the TV to a random channel. The news is depressing, the movies are bad, and the video games are repetitive. Half an hour later, he gets up again and walks around in his house. He checks the room Eduardo and Jay used, but it's been taken care of by housekeeping, no sign of visitors left.

In the end, he heads into the kitchen, where he once more unearths the package Jay sent, taking out the sweater. He pulls the hoodie he's wearing over his head and slips the sweater on, and even though it doesn't smell like Eduardo, there's something comfortingly familiar about wearing something he knows Eduardo has worn as well. It feels like being back in college, back when Eduardo kept stealing his sweaters when he got cold during movie nights.

Mark ignores the picture frame and the hard-drive and reaches for the notepad. The character designs are still very clear in his head, like he made them up yesterday instead of a decade ago. He hasn't drawn comic-style in forever. They haven't covered graphic novels in art class, and Mark tends to practice what he'll need for class and otherwise doodle random images that have very little to do with any coherent storylines.

For a moment, he just strokes the paper with a fingertip, wondering if this is a good idea. It was just a bit of fun in college, a joke. But then, Facebook started out that way. He takes a deep breath, calming himself against the strange wave of anxiety. He reaches over into a drawer, gets out the pencil case he keeps there. Inside are graphite and multiple colored pencils. He figures, maybe if he can get his thoughts down on the page this way, his instructor won't make disappointed eyes at him in their next class, and Zahra. Zahra is a normal human being - or as close to it as they get -, so maybe she'll be able to judge better than he can how crazy this is?

He gets his phone and texts her, ' _started working on a comic book.brainstorm on skype?_ '

A moment later, she texts back, ' _hey moonface great idea gimme two hours. vid u l8r :)_ '

He nods at his phone, places it a few inches away, before he picks up the first pencil and starts drawing.

He doesn't have the energy to feel surprised at himself when, hours later, the first handful of panels turn out to tell the story of two long ago broken-up superheroes who have to reconcile to deal with a apocalpyse-threatening supervillain.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark doesn't sleep that night, working on his drawings first. Then he codes for Facebook until morning dawns outside his window. It's about eight when he falls into bed, curls up, and sleeps.He wakes up at the sound of his doorbell and wants to ignore it, buries his face deeper into his pillow. Whoever it is can just go away. The bell sounds once more, and then there are voices and footsteps. Dustin has a key. For emergencies. Mark suddenly remembers that it's Sunday. He promised Dustin he'd come over because of Chris, who isn't in town nearly often enough, and who, Mark has to admit, is entirely too missable.

It's six pm, Mark's watch says. He slept through the whole day. He swears under his breath for not setting an alarm and heads downstairs to tell the guys to fuck off unless they've brought dinner with them. He's so hungry his stomach is grumbling. When he arrives at the bottom of the stairs, he realizes it's not just Dustin and Chris - who looks fresh-faced and happy, nauseatingly predictable for someone who's getting married soon. Eduardo's also standing with them. And Mark knows how ridiculous it is to flush all over, because this is _Eduardo_. But Mark is suddenly very aware that he drew superhero sex between two characters who are awkwardly similar to the two of them just a few hours ago. It doesn't really matter that it was in answer to Zahra's pleas for more racy material. The fact remains.

"Aw, look who's decided to grace us with his godlike presence," Chris teases the moment he spots Mark in the doorway. He's stealth-hugging Mark before Mark can protest. "It's good to see you. We decided to move dinner here. Since your gaming equipment is vastly superior to Dustin's -"

"All my equipment is vastly superior to Dustin's," Mark deadpans.

"Hey!"

"- and also, you weren’t answering your phone. What's up with that? You look - were you sleeping?" Chris looks concerned suddenly. "Are you sick?"

"No, just. All-nighter," Mark says. His gaze catches Eduardo's, who reddens and looks away.

"Right." Chris hesitates and glances back and forth between them. "Is this going to be too awkward?"

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you staged the reunion," Mark says dryly.

"I can leave," Eduardo says. "I told them I shouldn't come here, but -"

"Where's Jay?" Mark interrupts him.

Eduardo's eyes soften. "Dustin's house," he says. "Anna promised apple-cinnamon pancakes, so there was no getting her away from there."

Mark nods. They stare at each other for a few seconds, shifting. Chris clears his throat.

Dustin holds up the two full bags he's carrying. "Sadly, there will be no pancakes for grown men unless we make them ourselves, but who wants Chinese?" he asks loudly. "Because we bought enough to feed a small army. A Chinese army, admittedly, but still an army. Did you know ancient Chinese warriors could eat, like, nothing? That's crazy, right, I mean, I sit around all day and I can _still_ pack two steaks for dinner."

Eduardo gives Mark a weird half-smile, and Mark hotly remembers that he left all his drawings in the kitchen. He stiffens, says, "I gotta - um. You guys can sit down in the living room, I'll go grab the plates." Then he hurries into the kitchen to quickly hide away all signs of his impending mental break-down.

While getting the plates, he catches a glimpse of himself in a smooth surface and realizes that over the past few days, he's started to resemble a cave troll. Well, he's always looked a bit like a cave troll, but unshowered and unshaved, the similarities are much more striking. He's never had much patience for people who are superficial - who look at him, judge him ugly, and move on. He knows what he looks like and that he's not attractive. But he's never particularly cared about that, because the people who matter know what he can _do_ , what he can create, and that's what's important. But sometimes, especially when he's finding himself attracted to someone, he has moments where he wonders if that's what they see when they look at him, too.

It can't all be horrible; Erica wouldn't have gone out with a real cave troll, no matter the size of his brain. The girl who gave him a blowjob in the stall probably didn't think so either. Or the girl after that, or the boy from the gym he jerked off with in the showers. But there haven't been many. None of them have seen him like Eduardo has, at his absolute worst. And this isn't Mark's worst; he has gone days without a shower before, without seeing a hairbrush or sleep, but Mark's never wondered before if Eduardo would still kiss him now. If he would kiss him at all.

It'll be a moot point anyway if he can't recover their friendship.

Mark brings the plates out, says, "I'm going to grab a quick shower. I'll be back in five so don't eat everything while I'm gone, Dustin!" and doesn't register the once-over Eduardo gives him, eyes widening in surprise, until he's shedding the sweater, _the_ sweater, and then he realizes Eduardo must have recognized it. He steps into the stall, toothbrush in one hand, and closes his eyes against the hot water spray. _Fuck_ , he thinks.

Then again, Eduardo kept it with him _for years_. It only now occurs to him that it was probably what he was supposed to take from the package in the first place.

  
\- - - - -

  
They eat most of the Chinese food and play video games for a while but then get sidetracked by Chris' stories from the depths of the White House. Dustin jokes that soon after he's married to his sweetheart, Chris must become the first gay president and then they'll have a four-year party in Washington DC, and it's almost not awkward. Eduardo smiles and laughs in all the right places, but sometimes when Mark steals a glance at him, Eduardo's staring at his hands, pensive, eyes clouded.

"I'll go get some more beer," Mark says when it's gone dark outside and there's another lull in the conversation. The TV is on a reality show they've been making fun of, volume turned low. Chris is spread out over the carpet, arms crossed behind his head, Dustin's head pillowed on his thigh; Eduardo's leaning back against the couch, legs stretched before him.

They're all properly buzzed by now, and no one really minds the silence, but Mark cannot seem to sit still. He misses the feeling of keys beneath his fingers. He misses the feeling of skin beneath his fingers, and that has never happened to him before. He rises to his feet slowly, shaking his limbs to get rid of the feeling. There's more beer in the fridge, even though he still prefers Red Bull. It's good sometimes to get some alcohol into his bloodstream, instead of the usual sugar.

He's just rescued four more bottles, holding them clutched to his chest, when movement out of the corner of his eye startles him so that he almost drops it all. Eduardo's immediately closer, taking two off of him, leaving Mark to easily carry the other two. "You okay?" he asks gently.

Mark nods.

For a few long seconds, they stand there, not looking at each other. Then Eduardo says, "You changed your sweater."

Mark is indeed wearing one of his many newer hoodies. A safe one. He pushes his fists into its pockets and shrugs. "I slept in the other one," he says. "So I had to put it in the wash."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"It was - is mine, isn't it?" Eduardo asks.

"Technically, it's mine," Mark says. "You borrowed it in college."

Eduardo flushes. "I guess I must have. I didn't even notice it was gone."

"Yeah." Mark bites his lip. "Jay sent it. Along with some other things."

Eduardo's eyes widen. "What? Why would she do that?"

"Why did you keep them?"

"What?"

"The things. The sweater and the picture and my old drawings. You should have thrown them away. Or. Burned them."

"You watch too many romantic comedies."

"Maybe." Mark shrugs again. "Some of them are nice. Why did you, though?"

Eduardo moves away from Mark and over to the counters. He puts the beer down, opens one cabinet, then the next, until he finds a glass. He pours, drinks. Mark has no idea why the question is so difficult, but he can see in the tension of Eduardo's shoulders that it is, so he tries not to push. For once, they have time. Mark can't remember a moment where they would have had enough time during the birth of Facebook, before everything went to shit.

"I threw out most of the other things," Eduardo admits. "The silliest things. I threw out that miniature robot you made for my birthday. And then I went and found Jay one for her birthday, just because I'd loved the idea so much."

"It was a great robot," Mark says. He remembers building it from spare parts, programming software into its core. "Well, not for right now, but that was 2004. It was a great robot for 2004."

"That's my point," Eduardo says, slowly taking another sip.

Mark frowns. "What point?"

"It wasn't about the robot, Mark," Eduardo says. "It was - it was the thought that you put so much work and so much of your brilliance and time into a gift that was for me. That part, I will never be able to throw away, even when the robot's long gone."

Mark stares at Eduardo, then at the floor, mulling it over. "Like it's not about the money you gave," he finally says.

"Yes."

Something in his chest loosens. Maybe it's the expression on Wardo's face, even though he's also looking at Mark with the sort of hope that Mark has never understood. He's never liked expectations, not the kind Eduardo has for him. It makes him feel like he can never be enough.

"Mark," Eduardo says, voice breaking on the syllable. He clears his throat. "Look, I - when I stormed out on you two days ago. I was wrong to do that. I'm sorry."

"I didn't mean to - I really am sorry that I hurt you, too," Mark says. He hates how inarticulate he sounds in moments like these, like he cannot string even two words together. He can be eloquent about technical details, and when it comes to sharing ideas. Conversations about feelings elude him. But Eduardo doesn't seem to mind. He's smiling. It's one of those smiles that take over his whole face and make his eyes shine.

Of course, that is the moment Dustin chooses to holler from the living room, "Are you two making out in there or am I going to get another beer sometime soon?" and that breaks the moment. Mark rolls his eyes at Wardo and takes the beers back to the living room, ducking his head when he moves past Eduardo, mouth curling up at the corners. He has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from grinning widely. Maybe Dustin's got good timing for once. It would have been too much, too soon. They've got time.

Wardo follows on Mark's heels, handing Chris the beer and flushing when Chris waggles his eyebrows at them both.

"Just cleared up a few things," he mutters.

Chris' eyes crinkle round the corners, filling with warmth. "That's good," he says. When Eduardo turns around to sit down, he surreptitiously raises his hand and gives Mark a thumbs up, grinning broadly. Mark rolls his eyes again.

  
\- - - - -

  
Zahra drops by on Tuesday afternoon, which confuses Mark. It's not Thursday, and she has never visited him before.

Theoretically, he'd still be at the office at this time of the day, but Jay has demanded to see him after her tutoring sessions, so he's home and there to open the door. Zahra has her art bag slung over her shoulder and pink sunglasses on her nose. She pushes past him and heads inside without waiting for his invitation.

"Hey. I might have had guests," he tells her, closing the door.

She snorts. "Yeah. And I'm being followed by the FBI because I'm secretly running a terrorist cell downtown. We'll attack by pointing our paintbrushes at people and shouting 'Avada Kedavra'. So, like, help me, Obi-Wan, and so on."

Mark stares at her.

"What?" she grins. "It's about as likely as you having guests."

"I had guests on Sunday," Mark says, crossing his arms over his chest.

Her eyebrows go up over her sunglasses. She looks ridiculous wearing them in the house. Mark immediately decides to get a pair himself and walk into office with them tomorrow.

"No need to look so incredulous," he says. "We had dinner. A friend came to visit from New York, so -"

"A friend," Zahra says. Her voice manages to aptly put the quotes around 'friend'.

"Chris," Mark says, and then he bites his tongue. He knows he should have re-named his Superheroes. "I'm not saying anything anymore. Your evil womanly vices are confounding me." It makes her laugh, which is good. He can make girls laugh, sometimes; other times, instead of laughing, they slap him, or call him a jerk. He prefers the insult to the physical violence, though of course, laughing girls are ideal.

"Chris is the cute one, right?" Zahra asks. "The one who works for the President? Maybe I should recruit him to spread the terror."

"He likes phallic things," Mark says helpfully.

Zahra looks amused. "So do you, if I remember correctly. And with that, let us move on to the reason I came here. Those comics. Mark, you really can't help but be brilliant at everything you do, can you?" She throws up her hands.

"No point doing something if you're not the best at it."

"You know, some people might - or you know what. Forget it. Let's just keep up the good work. Also, I posted parts of what we drew Saturday on the internet."

"You what?" Mark's eyes grow huge.

"I'm kidding." Zahra smirks. "Don't freak out. Your secret's safe with me. Though you should possibly consider internet-publishing it when we're done drawing it. The storyline's amazing, and I never thought I'd say this, but our styles mash incredibly well."

Mark opens his mouth.

"And I'm still not coloring for you," she shuts him down.

"Fine," Mark says. "Just tell me right now if you'll sue me for co-founder status some day, will you? I'll have my lawyers draw up a contract beforehand to spare us millions in legal fees."

"Ouch," Zahra says. "Someone got burnt."

Mark doesn't even dignify that with a response.

  
\- - - - -

  
At five, his doorbell rings again.

"Wow, it's like fucking Central Station in here," Zahra comments.

"Funny. Also, fuck off," Mark calls while opening the door. It's Jay, who he was expecting, and Eduardo, who he wasn't expecting.

"I told him it was Mark-and-Jay-time," Jay says, "but he wouldn't listen. Apparently, he's been missing you, like the biggest sap on the planet."

"I'm standing right behind you," Eduardo says, cuffing her gently. He's blushing.

Jay gives him an unimpressed look. "Am I the twelve year old girl here, or are you?" And with that, she heads inside, pushing past Mark.

It's the second time a girl has done that to Mark today. He's starting to feel overwhelmed by the estrogen in his life. Then his attention moves back to Eduardo, fidgeting in his doorway.

"Um. Hey," Wardo says. He raises his hand and gives a tiny wave.

Mark blinks. "Hey," he says back. He does not wave back, because that's awkward, and maybe Eduardo really is a twelve year old girl. "You guys didn't switch bodies, did you?"

"No," Eduardo says. "Really not."

"Okay. I'm glad. Do - do you wanna come in?"

"I'm quite enjoying your doorstep, actually."

Mark would banter along, but when he hears the voices coming from the kitchen, he gets nervous. "Look," he says, "I should. There's - I have a friend over," he rushes out, just as Jay pops back up into the hallway, holding a glass of orange juice.

"Why am I not in your superhero comic?" she demands to know. "I asked Zahra and she says I am not in it."

"A what?" Wardo asks. "In a what?"

Mark opens his mouth, but Jay looks at Eduardo and holds her glass up at him. "Don't worry," she says. "You're in it plenty."

Mark closes his mouth. Then he makes in a mad dash for the kitchen.

  
\- - - - -

  
Zahra has already picked up the scattered pages of their drawings by the time Mark arrives at the kitchen table. Eduardo arrives seconds after Mark.

"Heya," Zahra greets him politely. "You must be Eduardo."

Eduardo gives her a quick once-over, his face drawn underneath the curiosity. "Nice to meet you," he nods. Then he turns to Mark. "What's going on?"

Mark glares at Zahra and holds out his hands. "Nothing. Just a project. Give them to me."

Zahra grins. "What's the magic word?"

"Zahra," Mark says.

"It's 'please'," Jay corrects him helpfully, popping up behind Eduardo. She wanders past them and to one of the counters where she places her empty juice glass.

"See? The little one knows how things work." Zahra's grin widens.

"That's because Wardo probably held her chicken soup hostage while she was sick until she learned to say it," Mark grumbles.

"That was once," Eduardo says. "And you were being an obnoxious jerk to everyone, you deserved it. I would never do that to Jay. Jay doesn't even like chicken soup when she's sick."

Mark opens his mouth.

"And don't you dare mention The Chicken." When Mark ducks his head, Eduardo narrows his eyes and turns to Zahra. "So you guys drew a comic? And it features me somehow?" he deduces.

Zahra ignores Mark's frantic headshakes. "Pretty much, yes." She meets Mark's glare with a shrug. "He figured it out, man. I'm not gonna lie. And Jay already saw them."

Eduardo looks back and forth between them, unsure. "Jay said it was superheroes," he says slowly. "Like the ones you drew in college, before you started working on Facebook?"

Mark looks at the floor. "Maybe."

"With more story," Zahra adds.

"And naked people," Jay chimes in.

Eduardo's eyebrows shoot up.

Mark feels himself flush. "It's not a children's comic," he protests. "There's nothing wrong with naked people." He turns to Jay. "You know there's nothing wrong with naked people, right? Unless they're me, in which case you probably don't want to be looking at that -"

"Mark," Eduardo interrupts.

"I know about naked people," Jay snorts. "And I don't think Wardo would mind you being the naked person. Just saying. But I really just want to be in it. Can I walk through walls? Shadowcat was always my favorite."

Mark stares at Eduardo, who's bright red and not looking back at Mark at all.

"I think maybe it would be best if we left them alone, to talk," Zahra whispers to Jay, loud enough for everyone to hear. She places the pages on the table and takes Jay by the shoulders."Let's go play."

"But I didn't bring my laptop."

"That's all right. Mark's probably got a chess set here somewhere. Do you play chess?"

Jay shrugs as they head out of the kitchen together. "I know how to play, but I'm not good at it."

"Why not?"

"Practicing was boring. I think I prefer Go. I had a friend from Korea who played Go really well; he taught me. Can we play Go?"

"Maybe later," Zahra says. Their voices thin out as they move further down the hallway towards the living room. "Chess first."

Mark clears his throat. "Um," he says. Eduardo's still not looking at him, so he picks up the comic and plays with the edges of the papers. "No one else has seen them beside Zahra. If that helps."

"Can I see them?" Eduardo asks.

Mark hesitates.

"Apparently, I feature prominently. And it's not any day you get to see yourself as a superhero."

"It's not very good," Mark says. "We're just playing around. The story's - you wouldn't like it."

"You can't know that."

"Why do you want to see it?"

Eduardo gives him a look. "Seriously?"

Mark nods. "It's just a comic."

"I liked your comics in college already," Eduardo tells him.

"What?"

"C'mon. You didn't notice?"

"Notice what?"

Eduardo rolls his eyes. He's leaning back against a counter, hands loosely curled around the edge. It makes Mark want to push up into him and kiss him, but he doesn't because he's fairly sure it would be unwelcome. Just because they've said sorry doesn't mean Eduardo is completely over everything that happened. Just because they're talking now doesn't mean they're friends again, just like that. Mark knows it doesn't work like that.

"I took a few pages," Eduardo admits. "You never missed them, so I figured either you knew and it was fine or you didn't care. I'm - I threw most of them out, back when, you know." He looks sad suddenly. "I probably shouldn't have done that. But you always drew the four of us as a team. And then sometimes just the two of us... I always thought that must have meant something. That you saw us as partners. After Facebook, whenever I looked at the drawings, I always felt like you saw me as nothing more than a disposable sidekick. So I got rid of them."

"Oh," Mark says. He thinks about the package Jay sent, the pages in there. So Eduardo didn't just pick them up by accident somewhere and forget to throw them away. He actually liked them. It's a strange thought for Mark, for whom they'd never been special. He looks at Eduardo, unsure. "Do you - should I apologize again?" he asks slowly.

Eduardo snorts. "No. It's fine, Mark. It's." He sighs, letting go of the counter to cross his arms in front of his chest. "I just wanted you to know that you're not always making the right assumptions."

"I know that."

"So can I see them?"

Mark winces. "Later," he promises. "I'll sort the good ones out."

"And now you've got me even more curious," Eduardo says, narrowing his eyes. "What's in them that you don't want me to see?"

It's Mark's turn to flush, even though he manages to keep his expression under control. "Nothing," he insists.

For a long moment, Eduardo looks at Mark. Then he sighs, giving in. "Fine. Later. I didn't mean to drop in on you like this, by the way. I know Jay wanted to come, to - I don't even know. Did you make plans with her? What did she want?"

"She didn't say. She just texted me to say she wanted to drop by. I figured she wanted to use the system."

Eduardo makes a face. "She can be a scheming little brat. I'll tell her not to bother you anymore."

"She's not a bother," Mark says. Eduardo looks at him in surprise, but it's the truth. She's a quiet kid, and she's smart, and she gets that sometimes the computer gets preferential treatment. It would be different if she was throwing tantrums to get his attention - Mark glances at Eduardo. Eduardo used to be good at those. He probably shouldn't say that out loud. So he says, "Maybe she just wanted to practice some coding again."

"I'm sure," Eduardo says. "I'll go get her and we'll be out of your hair -"

"No," Mark says.

"No?"

"You're not in my hair. I mean. Not literally, obviously, you're not literally near my hair, but also not figuratively. You should stay. We can make dinner. You bought so much stuff when you were here, and no one eats it. We should use it to make dinner."

"Oh," Eduardo says.

"If that's uncomfortable, Zahra can stay too."

Eduardo's lips quirk. "I should hope so. It's not good manners to kick out your friend before dinner's served."

Mark smiles back. "I'll keep it in mind."

They keep smiling at each other for a few more seconds, before Eduardo looks at the floor and runs his hand over the back of his neck. "So I'll go check up on Jay real quick, and you -"

"- can get the groceries."

When Eduardo's gone, Mark hurries to sort through the comic pages instead. There aren't many that have sex scenes in them, and only a handful more have naked people, but a lot of them have to do with the reunion and professions of eternal friendship and love. Mark had nothing to do with those. He would have been good with a non-hug and Eduardo's smile. But he likes them anyway, a bit like some of those romantic comedies that Dustin always makes fun of him for watching.

He finally settles on two pages. In one, the panels show them crime-fighting side by side; the other's a quiet scene of them sitting on a rooftop next to each other, looking out over the city. Zahra drew the faces because Mark couldn't get the eyes right, so they look familiar, and in love. Their pinkie fingers, resting next to each other, are barely touching; that detail's all Mark's.

He puts them on the table just as Eduardo's coming back and turns towards the fridge.

  
\- - - - -

  
For someone who was so desperate to see them, the strange non-reaction Eduardo has to the pages is unexpected and more than a little disappointing, even though Mark doesn't show it; he just keeps chopping the carrots. Dinner goes well though, despite the fact that Eduardo doesn't warm up to Zahra, unlike Jay, who keeps the table entertained with her chatter. It's only when Wardo's leaving that he tells Mark that they're flying back to Singapore the next evening, so they won't see each other until Eduardo's back in the US in a few weeks.

Jay stares at Mark wide-eyed, possibly telling him something in Morse code, if her twitching eyelashes are any indication. He knows what she expects him to do, but he can't. Instead, he watches them walk out the door to the rental car on the other side of the street. He feels like a coward but also relieved that he has more time.

"He likes you back. You know that, right?" Zahra says behind him.

Mark closes the front door. "You can't know that. I'm just happy we're speaking again."

"You could have more than that," she points out.

"Or I could have nothing. I don't - I really just want him to be there again." Mark doesn't look at her, opting to stare at his feet. It's the first time he's said that out loud.

Zahra hums. "Still. He's into you." When Mark frowns, she holds up her hands. "Hey, I just know. Call it a woman's intuition, or good observational skills, or whatever you want it to be."

"He didn't even like you," Mark tells her, pushing past her to go and clean up the kitchen.

Zahra lets out a laugh. "Exactly."

Mark has no idea what that's supposed to mean, but he really cannot be bothered to think about it right now, when he’s busy trying to figure out how he can keep in contact with Eduardo without looking like a pathetic stalker who's in unrequited love.

  
\- - - - -

  
Thankfully, Jay comes to the rescue in the form of a Facebook friend request a few days later, and of course if he adds her, he has to add Eduardo as well. It's only fair. Before he knows it, Eduardo's writing him, saying, ' _You do realize I don't use this as anything but an empty profile?_ '

And it's just like Eduardo to be so nonsensical. Mark barely restrains himself from telling Eduardo to stop it. He has a feeling it might result in Eduardo not writing him anymore, and Mark doesn't want that to happen. So instead he replies, ' _You should start using it. Sure Chris & Dustin would like that too. _'

It barely takes Wardo an hour to respond. ' _I keep in contact with them via Skype. You should try it sometime._ '

Which is ridiculous - Mark can video-conference with the best of them. How does Wardo think he deals with his overseas offices, by post carriage? But there is the fact that his private Skype contact list holds the names of his closest family members and less than a handful of friends, so he doesn't use it often for private calls.

He writes Eduardo his username before he can chicken out, and then he goes back to work. He controls himself until it's time to go home to check if Eduardo has added him, because while he's fairly sure Eduardo's message was an offer, he can never be sure. Sometimes he wishes there was a translator for things like these, that he could write a program that could take messages people write or say and turn them into something that he doesn't need to consider twice over.

The lights are slowly going out in the office. Most employees are heading home, and Ashley took off half an hour ago, so Mark closes out the code he was writing with an annotation for tomorrow and closes his work-Skype window, letting it reboot on his private one.

His heartbeat speeds up for the second it takes for Skype to run smoothly, and then a message blinks to life, announcing a new contact. Mark bites his lip to keep himself from smiling. He adds Eduardo back, and then sees there's a message attached to the request. It says, ' _Let's see how often we can sync up._ ' There's a winking smiley at the end of it, which would be annoying from anyone but Eduardo.

He also gets a message from his mom, because ever since she learned how to use Skype's offline-message function, she writes him reminders to eat properly and dress appropriately and not go to bed so late. He tunes it out and concentrates on writing a reply to Wardo. It takes him a long minute before he decides on, ' _you can call me whenever. I'd like that._ ' It feels nicely noncommittal while also inviting continued discourse. Ashley would be proud. And sure, Eduardo's offline at the moment, but he'll have to come back online eventually.

After hitting 'Send', he switches to Jay's Facebook page and writes, ' _Hope you're doing well'_ on her wall. He only remembers when he's on his way to his car that it might not have been the best idea to do that in a public post, but by then, it's too late, so he shrugs and carries on.

Half an hour later, stuck in evening traffic, he gets a text message. ' _You're evil!_ ' Jay writes. ' _Will get u back for this so hard._ '

And all right, that sounds ominous, but there's not much she can do beside crash Facebook again, Mark's fairly sure. It's not like he posts anything private on Facebook; he knows better than that. Not that there is anything private he _could_ post. He's a hermit crab. Mark catches his reflection in the rearview mirror and makes a face at himself. Maybe a cross between a hermit crab and a cave troll.

And that reminds him of the hair appointment Ashley put in his calendar for tomorrow, so he makes a face again. She keeps refusing to cut it herself. If she weren't so good at her job, he'd fire her and get an assistant who can perform a simple hairbotomy.

He gets home a few minutes later, sits down in front of the TV, and boots up his laptop, Skype first. He checks Jay's Facebook and realizes his post on her feed elicited a torrent of comments ranging from OMGs to gasps of terror and at least a dozen conspiracy theories. Getting over two hundred new messages in her inbox must have been fun. Mark grins to himself. Whoops.

The TV keeps running while he gets two calls - first from his mom, pouncing on him the moment they're online at the same time, and then from his sister, who's more pragmatic and wants to talk business instead of babies.

Eduardo doesn't come online and doesn't write again before Mark falls asleep later that night.

  
\- - - - -

  
He wakes up to the sound of his Skype ringtone and clicks to answer before he's truly awake, which leads to him coming face-to-face with an annoyingly snappy looking Eduardo, who opens his mouth in a greeting and starts laughing instead.

"What?" Mark asks, aggravated, and tries to flatten his hair down while rubbing the sand from his eyes. "What are you - Wardo, fuck, it's six in the morning! Fuck."

"Sorry, I forgot, it's past nine in the evening here." Eduardo doesn't sound sorry at all. His laugh is bright and beautiful, and Mark wants to bury his face in the couch cushions because the camera is merciless about all of his deficiencies.

Instead, he rubs his fingers over face a few more time, shifts, wills down the problem in his pants that comes with his awkward feeling of self-conscious desire, and says, "I think I fell asleep on the couch."

"I think so, too." Eduardo grins. "But hey, it's a Saturday. You don't have to go into work today, do you?"

"Always have to go into work," Mark mumbles. "But shower first."

"Right. I won't keep you then -"

"No," Mark says.

"No?"

"No, stay. I. I'll take just five minutes. We can talk. Just need a coffee too. Ten minutes?" He knows he sounds idiotic, but he can't help that his brain's not up to full working power yet.

Eduardo looks ready to burst into laughter again. "All right," he says with a grin. "I'll go and, oh, update my Facebook status while I'm waiting."

"You're in a fucking good mood," Mark mutters, while he falls off the couch and all but crawls towards the shower.

Once he's under the water spray, he slowly starts to feel like a human being again. It clears his head, and when he's got his hand on himself, jerking off to thoughts of Eduardo going down on him, it only gets better. It does feel both embarrassing and strange at the same time, with the sound of Eduardo's laughter still ringing in his ears, but it mostly feels amazing. When he comes, eyes squeezed shut, his whole body seizes up and then relaxes, making him flush from the heat.

The whole thing barely takes more than two minutes, which is good under the circumstances. It makes him feel less guilty, because at least he fantasized about Wardo for two minutes and not an hour. Soon, he's out, getting dressed and making coffee before he heads back to the computer.

Eduardo has his intense-face on when Mark sits down, ready to... something. Talk, probably. Mark blinks at his reflected camera-self.

"You're back," Eduardo says. His intense-face vanishes, replaced by a small smile, head tilted curiously. "You look better."

"Thanks," Mark says, straining as he smiles back. He doesn't smile often, but it feels good. "Uh, so. What's going on?"

"Just work," Eduardo replies easily. "Nothing interesting. I'm also trying to get the relocation into gear. It's a while off, but the days pass so quickly and it's always good to be done with all the time-consuming shit early."

"Oh," Mark says. "That's good. That's - have you decided where you'll be staying?"

Eduardo's expression turns pained for a second before he manages to hide it. It's very obvious that he has trouble working up a smile, which is something Mark has always wondered about. Eduardo smiles a lot and laughs and always tries to be so cheerful and easy-going. Even when he's not feeling well, he still does that. It used to drive Mark crazy. By now he understands that it serves the same function as his own non-expression; Eduardo just uses the smile because it's more socially acceptable than staring at someone without moving a muscle.

"It'll have to be California," Eduardo says. "We - uh. We were considering Florida, remember?"

"Yeah."

"But. We - Jay and I, I mean, we stopped over at my parents' on our way back home from California, and that. Didn't go too well."

Mark's eyebrows go up. "Your parents don't like Jay?" He has no idea why the thought makes him bristle. He doesn't even know Eduardo's parents, and he only has a tentative friendship with Jay going, at best, but there's something about the thought of Eduardo having to go through it that makes him want to kick something.

"No, no, my - my mother loves Jay. It's just the relocation that's a problem, especially with Jay's grandparents moving along, and they would be getting a house somewhere nearby, and my - ah. It doesn't matter. We'll just come to California. It's closer to Singapore anyway, so the flights back and forth won't waste even more time." Eduardo tries to look cheerful and fails miserably.

Mark chews on his lower lip for a moment before he nods. His heart is beating fast and hard, face heating up, and he doesn't look into the camera when he says, "I'm glad. I wanted - I mean. It will be good having you back. I mean. Not _having you_ having you. But you being back. That will be good. If you wanted to. I mean. If you wanted to see me again. Sometime. When you're back."

Eduardo gives a little cough. Mark snaps his mouth shut and feels like his head is going explode from the amount of blood that's being carried to his face. Then Eduardo cracks up. It transforms his whole face, and Mark feels a tiny bit better about being a complete loser when he remembers it is one of the things Eduardo's always liked best about him.

"You're ridiculous," Wardo says. "You're – Mark. We're talking now, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"So we'll still talk when I'm back."

Mark takes a deep breath, hiding it as well as he can. "All right," he says, composing himself. "Good. That's good." And then, to quickly divert the attention from himself, he asks, "So what's Jay been up to?" remembering that talking about her always makes Eduardo's face animated and happy. And he seems to be on to something there, because Eduardo relaxes and beams at him like he's proud of _Mark_ , and Mark just leans back, sipping his coffee, and thinks they should do this a lot from now on, because his stomach is flip-flopping, but it's a really good feeling.

  
\- - - - -


	4. Chapter 4

They keep in touch. They email and text, but most of the time, they vid-call. At first, it's random, Eduardo calling Mark on Monday morning and kicking him out of bed, because Mark's fallen asleep with his laptop open next to him, and on Thursday evening when Mark's just come home from art class.

Mark calls Wardo the next Saturday morning and is told to make himself coffee, get those croissants Eduardo bought out of the freezer and into the oven, make himself an egg or two and toast, and cut up a tomato on top of it all. So Mark does. And then they sit together and talk while Mark eats breakfast, while Eduardo snacks on chips and a beer and the hand of his clock is ticking towards midnight. It's nighttime for Wardo, and he looks languid and happy in his chair, smiling like a man who's just spent a relaxing day having fun with his daughter, which, apparently, is what Eduardo and Jay do on Saturdays.

From then on, Saturday mornings turn into a routine: the next Satuday, Mark thinks to buy croissants himself, so he just reheats them, no unfreezing necessary. He eats a bowl of cereal and a banana, and Eduardo giggles at him all through it, another victory for the twelve year old girl inside him.

The Saturday after that, Wardo listens to Mark bitch about the incompetence of a handful of employees, especially contractors and practitioners of law, as he tries not to spit crumbs of his toast everywhere, and the next Saturday, they talk about Facebook and about Jay, about Eduardo's project plans for a new mobility app and about Singapore.

"You should come out sometime," Eduardo says at one point.

It makes Mark choke on a spoonful of cereal, and he has to put everything down to cough into his hands, face red.

"Huh," Eduardo says slowly. "That - was vivid."

"No. I - I mean yes. But because it was unexpected. I didn't think you were going to say that." Mark swallows and clears his throat again.

Eduardo looks mildly unsettled. "Is that a no?"

"No," Mark says.

"So it's a yes then?"

"It's not that simple," Mark tries.

"All right," Eduardo says. "So it's a no."

"No, I just mean. I would like to." The desire itself is not unexpected. He's always enjoyed and wanted to be in Eduardo's radius, even back in freshman year. Not understanding it then, he'd ignored it and done everything to take his mind off Eduardo.

"All right," Eduardo repeats. "But?"

"Facebook's here," Mark reasons.

Eduardo tilts his head. "Is it about to crash in the foreseeable future?"

"No. But you can never be sure."

"Are there any big updates you need to be supervising?"

"Well, no, but even the smaller ones require -"

"Would Facebook die a pitiful death if you were to not come into the office for a few days?"

Mark bites his lip. Eduardo's mouth curls up in a smile, and Mark imagines himself kissing it, imagines himself brave enough to just do it. Maybe Eduardo really wants him there, wants him - wants _something_ , too. Maybe this could be his chance to change something.

"I guess - maybe it'll be fine?" he hears himself say slowly.

Eduardo's smile grows bigger. "Finish your cereal. It's getting soggy," he says. There's a gentle tone to his voice that makes Mark's chest ache. He nods. "And I'll call Ashley and have her book your flight."

  
\- - - - -

  
Singapore is fast-paced and packed with people hurrying up and down streets, almost bowling him over while at the same time keeping a respectful distance. Eduardo's house is small and cute, a few miles off seaside. He finds it located in a not-so-busy street, with a tiny garden that's barely visible over the greenery-covered walls.

Eduardo promised to pick Mark up, but Mark somehow messed up the times and his plane arrived a few hours early, so here he is, on his own, proud conqueror of Singapore's public transport system and successful reader of a map acquired at the Changi Airport. He rings the bell with a nervous churn in his stomach, hoping Eduardo is at home at this hour in the morning. He hears it echo through the house, a soft ding, then footsteps that make him breathe easier.

The door opens and reveals Eduardo. His shirt is untucked and unbuttoned, sweatpants hanging low on his hips. He's holding a cup of coffee in his left hand, and when he recognizes Mark, the frown turns into a brilliant smile. "You're here!" he says.

"I am," Mark confirms.

"Why are you here already?" Eduardo asks. "Did I misread your message? It's barely ten."

"Time zones aren't my strong suit," Mark says. "At least it's not pouring."

Eduardo's mouth does a funny thing between a smile and his pressed-together lips of exasperated disapproval. "Come on inside," he then says. He leads Mark to a door and pushes it open, revealing a warm yellow room with a wide, comfortable-looking bed.

"This is where you'll be staying, if that's all right."

"It's beautiful," Mark says, knowing what tone is expected. It's nicer than his own room at home, with its bare white walls and the simple single bed. Eduardo turns pink at the praise, and Mark realizes in a startling moment of insight that Eduardo must have prepared the room ahead of time.

"The devil child's out?" he asks, ignoring the warm sensation in his belly with practiced ease.

Eduardo grins. "They're having an adventure day out in nature, don't ask me. She is in this biology class, the teachers have crazy ideas. A few weeks ago, they went shrimp-fishing in a circle-of-life lesson kind of way. Traumatizing."

Mark tilts his head. "It is easier when they just turn up on your plate."

"Exactly. Speaking of plates, you haven't had breakfast yet, and I have fresh coffee."

Mark follows him into the kitchen and sits on one of the stools while Eduardo pours him a cup. The whole house is very modern, smooth surfaces and round edges, but the walls are painted in warm colors, and the adjoining living room looks like someone had fun dipping into different pots of paint. He assumes Jay had a hand in this. It feels like home, which is a strange thought to have. He takes the offered cup and says, "Will you be selling this place when you move?"

Eduardo hesitates. "Probably not," he says. He turns to the counter. "It was hell buying this one, with the forms and legalities and proving that Jay's a citizen. And who knows, maybe we'll come back some day." He finds a covered plate and takes off the foil, revealing pancakes. He puts them in the microwave, and thirty seconds later, Mark has a plate of warm pancakes in front of him, and Eduardo is shoving syrup and strawberries and cinnamon at him.

"I'm not actually hungry," Mark protests weakly.

"You're barely visible," Eduardo says with a smile. "If I don't feed you, no one else will, and then what? You'll vanish completely. We can't have that."

Mark stares at the pancakes, wondering if he can burn a hole through them with his laser eyes. Probably not. "Facebook wouldn't crash and die, even if I vanished," he finally says, because he can't say the other thing on his mind.

"You're here, aren't you," Eduardo agrees. "So probably not." He sits down opposite Mark at the table and steals a piece of Mark's pancake with his fork. "But I wasn't talking about Facebook."

Mark looks up at that. Eduardo's face is open, honest, as it tends to be when he says things like that.

Eduardo flushes. "Look, I know I've been... difficult," he says slowly. "And this is still not easy for me. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, because I got hurt so badly last time. But I figure you should know that I don't want you to vanish or die or get hurt or anything like that. I never wanted that. Well, no, okay, when I realized - back at the Facebook offices, I wanted to hurt you a lot then, but mostly I just wanted to shoot myself for being such a naive idiot."

"Wardo -"

"The rest of the time, I want you to exist and be happy or whatever form of being happy you want to be. Being yourself. You know what I mean." Eduardo's flushing deeper, from his neck and cheeks up to his ears.

Mark nods. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, then he breathes out and says, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay." Mark nods again. He has a feeling he didn't do too badly with this conversation.

He finishes the pancake, enjoys the sight of Eduardo picking little bits of it from Mark's plate to put in his mouth. The coffee is good too. It should be terribly domestic and uncomfortable, but instead it feels warm and satisfying. When he's done eating, he remembers to check his watch. "Don't you have to get to work?"

Eduardo snorts into his coffee. "I was going to pick you up, remember? So no, I took the day off. And the rest of the weekend. Next week, I expect you'll be sick of my company and beg me to go back to work so you can code in peace."

Mark grins back. "Probably." But not just yet.

The rest of the morning, they sit in companionable silence, enjoying their breakfast.

  
\- - - - - -

  
Jay sends him a text message around noon that reads, ' _Hope u arrived well. Don't do anything I wouldn't do._ '

An hour later, there’s a message from Dustin: ' _soooooo have you christened the place yet?_ '

When Mark checks his email, he sees that Ashley wrote him: ' _Facebook stands. Employees suitably terrified by transfer of power to queen. Will keep all enemies at bay until your safe return. (Hope Eduardo's doing well, give him my kisses! Literally!)_ '

The underlying message seems to be that he's completely unsubtle about wanting to kiss Eduardo, which is both worrying and also promising because apparently they’re assuming he won’t get punched and kicked out of the country.

"What's got you thinking so hard?" Eduardo asks.

They're taking a stroll through the city because Mark has never been to Singapore before. The seaside is impressive, even though it's not what most people would consider beautiful or relaxing. Mark doesn't own a camera, because he never does touristy things, and now he almost regrets that. It means he won't have any pictures of this moment.

"Just wondering about some things," he replies. "Photographs." It's easier than saying, 'Introspective things about the world, people, and myself.' It would make Eduardo laugh, Mark's pretty sure.

"Hm," Eduardo says and doesn't ask further.

They walk for another hour, and then they sit down at one of the small kitchen-style diners for a bite to eat, before Eduardo ushers them back towards the house. "Gotta pick up the kid in half an hour," he says, and that's what he does, leaving Mark alone in his house.

Mark uses the first ten minutes to snoop, but there's not a lot to discover. There's one bedroom that's similar in style to Mark's guestroom, most certainly Eduardo's. There's a teenager's room, all colorful tapestries and a four-poster bed and video games, not quite a mess but close enough - Jay's room. There are movie posters and music posters, and for a moment, Mark feels like he's been teleported back into his own childhood.

It's funny to him that people seem to think that when he was twelve, he lived in a white-walled cell with a bowl of water and only his laptop to keep him company. He was obnoxious as a teenager, sure, and glued to his laptop a lot more than other teenagers his age in a time where computers were rare, but there were also video game marathons with classmates and movie posters and Jedi swordfights and epic pillow-fights with his sister. The thought makes Mark smile.

He goes back to his own room after his expedition and sits down at his laptop. When he opens his account, he sees the email Ashley sent him a few days ago with his flight information and realizes he didn't even check what the return date was.

There is no return date. He stares at the screen for a moment, then reads Ashley's note tacked underneath the flight information. ' _Stay as long as you like. I've cleared your calendar for the next week or so. Write me whenever you're done with whatever it is you're about to do (keeping my fingers crossed!)_ '

  
\- - - - -

  
Jay is bouncy and excited when she gets back, talking about the trip, about a friend who lost her wallet during the day and a boy who told her a joke and later showed her a turtle he'd found near one of the biotopes they saw. Eduardo's eyebrows go up when she can’t stop talking about him, and Mark almost chokes on his own tongue watching them do that particular dance of parent-child interaction.

She does get annoying after a while, with her higher-than-usual pitched chatter, so he blocks her out and starts doodling something into the little sketchbook he always carries around in his pockets until he realizes that they've both fallen silent. He looks up.

The TV is on, and they're sitting next to each other, Jay's head against Eduardo's shoulder, watching a show about dinosaurs and archaeology. It's sweet, the way she's half-asleep on Eduardo's shoulder. He keeps pushing a strand of her hair behind her left ear every few minutes. Mark looks back down onto his sketchbook and scrutinizes the doodles of Jay in superhero uniform, which is not what he'd planned when he started.

At eleven, Eduardo sends her off to bed. "Ten minutes," he gives her sternly when she makes a face. "Brush your teeth, wash up, climb into bed, and then lights off."

Mark watches him, fascinated. Jay rolls her eyes at them both and wanders off.

"You know," Mark hears himself say to Eduardo, "If you used that tone on me, I think I'd do what you said, too."

Eduardo laughs and rises to his feet. Mark was going to feel awkward about saying something so candid, but the reaction makes him relax again, especially when Eduardo moves behind the armchair and looks at the drawing over Mark's shoulder. His body is warm, his breath tickling Mark's ear when he says, "Huh."

Mark shifts in his seat, and keeps drawing for a minute or two, not saying anything.

Finally, Eduardo pokes his neck. "Is that -?"

"Jay. Yes," Mark admits. "Sorry. I didn't - I should have asked permission, but I didn't think she'd mind."

"It's fine. She'll love it."

"You think?" Mark looks up.

Eduardo's looking down at him with those huge eyes, all gentle and brown, the corner of his mouth curled up, and Mark wishes he were brave enough to reach up and pull him down into a kiss. He can imagine all the ways it could go wrong, from breaking his nose because of the strange angle, to Eduardo mauling him to death like a grizzly bear for his forwardness. Mark is sort of afraid of bears.

Eduardo blinks a few times, tears his gaze away from Mark's just as Jay stops in the doorway to the living room. She places her hands on her hips. "I'm done," she announces.

Mark looks at her, pyjama-clad, chin jutted out, watching them with narrowed eyes like she sees everything that is going on under this roof, yes Sir. He tears out the page and holds it out for her. "Have some cool dreams," he says.

Her eyebrows climb up just like Eduardo's do. She takes the piece of paper, looks at it. "Is that me?"

"Superheroes," Eduardo agrees.

She lets out a little yelp. "Thank you, Mark!"

She runs over, leans into him to give him a hug; he wants to draw away but there's nowhere to go. It turns out not to be so bad, though, because she's very quick about it. A moment later, she's running off to bed, not looking back.

Eduardo's staring at Mark like Mark's an alien from another planet. It's not uncommon, he should be used to it by now, but this one's different. Eduardo's staring at Mark like he _likes_ what he sees, and Mark has trouble breathing.

"We should head to bed too," Eduardo finally says with a rare roughness to his voice.

Mark just nods.

  
\- - - - -

  
Sunday is Grandparents Day for Jay, like Saturday is Wardo Day; early in the morning, Eduardo knocks on Mark's door and whispers, "Mark? I'll be gone for a few hours. Feel free to sleep in."

They went to bed at half past eleven, and Mark didn't want to break the no-work agreement, so he didn't stay up later to code. He's been awake since six, reading a paperback from the shelf. It's quite good, he's surprised to find. It's a crime thriller. He hasn't read one of those since he was a pimple-faced youth hiding out in the back of the library to ditch gym class.

About an hour after Eduardo's left, Mark unearths from the confines of his warm bed because his stomach starts to make itself known. He makes himself a sandwich, figures out the coffee machine without accidentally destroying it, and then sits down in front of the TV and watches National Geographic until he falls asleep.

He wakes up when a jolt races through his body, a sensation of shock when something drips onto his face; he flails out for it, trying to get it off, and Eduardo's laughing above him, a glass of warm water tilted dangerously. "You should be grateful I didn't put your fingers in it," he teases.

Mark sticks out his tongue and rubs his eyes at the same time. He's still dressed in his pyjamas, while Eduardo looks impeccable in his suit.

"Do you wear those to sleep?" Mark asks bitingly, even though last night, Eduardo was wearing sweatpants again and an old t-shirt that was tight enough to show off his abs.

"Sometimes." Eduardo grins, not bothered by the grouchiness. "Now get up, come on. I'm taking you shopping."

  
\- - - - -

  
They hang out all day, and it almost feels like they're back in college: two boys fooling around, chatting about the latest movies, politics, exchanging tidbits about their families, just enough to keep the conversation light.

But Mark is very aware what's different this time: he's giving Wardo more than the minimal necessary amount of attention, for once. And it's not that he didn't do that on purpose before; it was just how he operated, with his head full of ideas and other problems that he was solving at the same time. He used to be so secure in the knowledge that Wardo would always be there - sitting outside Mark's classroom, hanging out in front of Mark's door, waiting for him by their usual cafeteria in time for lunch. He knows now that Eduardo can leave anytime.

The other change is Eduardo himself. He's different in a way Mark can't quite put his finger on. It bothers him for a while before he decides it doesn't really matter. They have what they have and it's going well. Eduardo looks happy to be spending time in Mark's company. It's a lot more than Mark could have hoped for.

In the evening, Eduardo takes Mark to a restaurant for dinner. He's well-known there it seems, eliciting smiles and bows of greeting. Mark with his jeans and sweater feels a tad out of place, but not for long. When they leave, two hours later, they're both tipsy and a little bolder than usual.

They've been talking about Chris getting married and who'll be wearing the dress, and about Dustin's antics. Eduardo almost doesn't manage to unlock the front door, his hand is shaking so hard from laughter when Mark tells him the last prank Dustin pulled on the Facebook board before he left. Apparently, Dustin's suffering from selective memory and told Eduardo a completely different version of events.

They stumble inside and into the living room, and Mark asks, "When's Jay coming back?"

"Staying at her grandparents' for the night." Eduardo grins over his shoulder. "Her grandma is giving her another sushi tutorial, I expect. Bonding time, don't interrupt, and so on. I'll pick her up tomorrow morning."

Mark smiles. It makes Eduardo grin harder, before he turns toward the kitchen and heads for the fridge. "Beer?" he calls.

"Sure," Mark says, even though he doesn't like the taste of it here and is unsure how much more alcohol he can take before he just falls asleep. He's had half a bottle of a wine that probably costs more than his car. Not that Eduardo can't afford it, but it's the principle of the matter. Mark can't tell a superb wine from a good one; he just knows that some make his tastebuds tingle and others make him grimace in pain. The one Eduardo picked was really, really good.

Mark takes the beer anyway, and when Eduardo makes to move further down the couch, Mark grasps his sleeve, then his wrist and pulls him to sit down next to him. Mark doesn't normally initiate contact, but right now, he feels like he needs to do something to keep up, and he likes the sensation of Eduardo being close. He likes how it makes him feel when he can twitch and shift into another position and have Eduardo right there, shoulder to shoulder.

"You're smiling," Eduardo notes when Mark looks at him sideways. His eyes are wide and pensive.

Mark tries to fight for his usual blank face but it doesn't come. He's exhausted from Eduardo's killer pace around the city, the shopping for new shirts, dress pants, black boots, almost like he's planning something . So he just dims the smile as much as he can, defensive, and says, "So?"

Eduardo shrugs. "Nothing. Sorry, I didn't mean to sound like I was - I meant it as a compliment. It suits you."

"Oh," Mark says. "All right?" He takes a sip from his bottle and puts it on the table. "I don't normally drink so much," he finally says, by way of excuse.

"No parties in Silicon Valley that are to your liking?" Eduardo teases.

Mark shrugs.

"Surely Sean gets you properly hammered every once in a while."

"Wardo -"

"I was joking."

"Sean and I don't talk all that much anymore." When Eduardo doesn't react to that announcement, just stares at his bottle, a warm presence by Mark's side, Mark soldiers on. "I realized you weren't going to be back, after the depositions, after the settlement, and he got caught up in that ugly drug business. I've never understood that. There are easier ways to stimulate the brain."

Eduardo snorts.

"Sean was really good for the company when it was a baby," Mark says. "He knew the right people, the right strategy. But in the long run, he would have run it into the ground. He has good ideas but he's shit on the follow-through. It was better for him to leave. He knew that, too."

"He was your friend," Eduardo says, voice cooling a few degrees.

"He was - he's still my friend, in a way, but he's not my _friend_. We talk about friendship a lot in my - with people. Other people. He's not the kind of friend who you have things in common with. We just catch up once every year or so. We like different things. He's not the kind of friend who you can talk to for hours."

"Like we did today?"

Mark nods.

Eduardo is biting his lower lip, thoughtful. "Who else is your friend?"

Mark shrugs. "Dustin. Randi. Chris used to be, but he's been really busy with his life. But we try? So that probably counts." He hesitates. "Zahra." He's never tried talking to her for hours, but he has a feeling she has some interesting views about things. But that's it. There are people he talks to about certain things: Ashley at work, and sometimes Dave and Akiko and Anbu, his head programmers. Mike at the gym. His friends online for coding mischief.

Eduardo's nodding. He doesn't look surprised that Mark doesn't have a list with dozens of people. They both know that he's a difficult person to be around. Mark's okay with that. Most people aren't worth changing for.

"Remember when I told you that you weren't my friend?" Eduardo says, turning his head to look at Mark. His thumb's grazing the rim of his bottle, but his eyes are on Mark's face, tracing every line before he catches Mark's gaze and holds it.

Mark remembers.

Eduardo swallows. "I'd like to be your friend again, if you want to."

Mark wants to, badly. But he wants more, too. His eyes drop to Eduardo's mouth. It's all the warning, his stomach knot of nerves, before Mark's leaning forward and into it, pressing their lips together, short and dry except for the lingering beer drops.

Eduardo's stunned, but only for a second before he follows Mark's mouth, and then they're kissing, open and desperate and licking and biting, hands wandering to grasp necks and fingers running over cheeks and through hair, and Mark thinks, _This_.

  
\- - - - -

  
Mark has had sex in a proper bed with exactly two people: with his girlfriend in high school, which was a disaster, and Erica in college, which was a lot better because she knew what she was doing and at that point Mark had done research on the internet that consisted of more than watching porn.

He isn't sure if what they did last night constitutes sex, since there was no actual insert A into slot B, but he figures - blowjobs count as sex, right?

In any case, it won't matter soon, because Mark is planning on having more sex with Eduardo as soon as he wakes up. Or maybe after a shower. His head _is_ a little bit heavy. Eduardo next to him helps with that, though. He's warm and a cuddler, which is completely unsurprising. What is surprising is that Mark finds himself tolerating it despite the fact that he doesn't like touching in general. Erica was fine with that, not a cuddler herself, but a lot of people mind.

It must be early in the morning, he never sleeps in long. Mark tries not to wake Eduardo when he twists onto his side to rescue his arm. He doesn't manage to check his watch before he hears the footsteps outside the door. Mark wants to jump out of bed in alarm, but the door has already opened a crack.

Jay's face appears. She peeks inside, head around the door, stretching her neck. When her gaze meets Mark's, her eyes grow impossibly huge under her fringe. Then her face breaks out into a smirk and she slams the door shut behind herself. Mark considers following her until he realizes Eduardo's stirring beside him, slowly getting up onto his elbows. His need to run after Jay vanishes.

"Wha-" Eduardo mumbles. "What's going on? Who was -?" He pulls his arm off Mark completely and rubs his eyes.

"Jay's back," Mark tells him.

Eduardo drops his hand, whips his head around. "Shit. What time is it? Jesus."

Mark checks again. When he sees the time, he blinks. "Huh. It's past eleven."

Eduardo swears again. "I was supposed to pick her up at ten!"

"It... was probably the wine. And things," Mark says, feeling himself flush.

Eduardo's expression turns careful. His eyes are hooded, too blank for Mark's liking. "Last night," he starts, hesitates. "We - I mean." He bites his lip, clears his throat. "I mean. Was that what you wanted? We were both a little drunk, that wasn't part of the – I mean. If that wasn't what you wanted..."

"No," Mark protests. He's holding onto the sheets, kneading them in his fist, but he doesn't drop his gaze from Eduardo's face. "I wanted to. A lot."Then something clicks in Mark’s head, and he can’t believe he didn't see it last night. "You - you planned that," he says, stunned. "The fancy dinner, and Jay at her grandparents' place and the -"

Eduardo is smiling. Mark finds himself smiling back. He can feel how his cheeks are creased with pillow marks, a little numb, and his hair is probably standing up in all directions. He always looks like death after he wakes up, but Eduardo - he just looks at Mark like he's special in the best way, smiling wider the longer Mark keeps smiling, too. Mark's cheeks hurt. He leans in -

\- and a phone starts buzzing on the desk. Then Mark's phone starts up too, ringing his message alert. They both turn in the direction of their phones, then turn back to each other. Eduardo's phone falls silent after a minute, but Mark's keeps going. Mark blinks. It sounds like a shit-ton of messages.

"I should get that," he says slowly. "It's - I told Dustin if something happened with Facebook, he should message me."

Wardo's smile turns wry. "It's okay."

Mark leans over and quickly kisses him square on the mouth. It's too sharp and stiff to be a good kiss, but he figures he gets his message across when Eduardo's smile softens around the edges.

"It's really fine," Eduardo says again. "Go, get your laptop, too; if it's really the Facebookalypse, you should be prepared." He grins and kisses Mark more gently, thumb rubbing the spot behind Mark's ear before he slips off the bed himself. "I should go check on Jay, anyway, make sure she's not traumatized."

Mark tells himself that ignoring the messages in order to stay in bed to have sex with Eduardo is not a good CEO decision. The fact that he has to tell himself that makes his head spin.

He goes for the phone while Eduardo's pulling on pants. There are at least four messages from Dustin, but there are also a handful from family, one from Ashley, two from Chris. He opens the last one from Chris. It reads, ' _And Mark, if you want PR help with that, I'm on hand if you need me._ '

Mark's eyebrows climb up. He hears Eduardo open the door, opens Dustin's latest message, and reads, ' _ALSO WHEN ARE YOU GETTING MARRIED AM I YOUR BEST MAN I AM YOUR BEST MAN RIGHT??!!! EVEN THOUGH YOU NEVER MENTIONED ANY COURTING BUT I HAVE EYES. I HAVE EYES SO I KNEW!_ '

"Wardo," Mark says, almost choking on the word as he thumbs another message open.

Eduardo looks at him worriedly. "Is everything okay? It's not really the Facebookalypse, is it?"

"No," Mark says. "I don't think this has to do with Facebook."

"What's going on?"

Mark opens the text from his mom. It says, ' _I have to find out about this via Facebook status? Pick up my Skype call. I know you're online._ '

But he's not online. He hasn't even turned on the computer yet. Which means -

"I think your kid just told the world we had sex."

Eduardo opens his mouth. "Jay!" he yells.

Jay's laughter from the living room is on a par with any great villain's. Mark narrows his eyes as she yells, "Revenge, Mark Zuckerberg!"

\- - - - -

  
Mark's Facebook wall reads ' _In a Relationship with Eduardo Saverin_ '. He feels surprisingly okay with that.

"What?" Jay asks innocently when Eduardo sits down next to her on the couch, scowling. Her eyes travel to Mark. "Am I wrong?" There's something sharp to her voice that makes Mark uncomfortable.

"You were wrong to do this, Jay. It's unfair to both of us," Eduardo tells her. "Mark and I, we're not - we haven't discussed anything yet. It's unfair to put Mark on the spot now, and -"

"Actually, it is fine with me," Mark says quickly before he can lose his nerve.

Eduardo stops talking and stares at him.

Mark flushes but holds his gaze and shrugs. "If you're - I mean. Not if you don't want that. Obviously. But in that case, I'll have to call Chris back in for PR and I doubt he has that kind of time right now. Even though he promised he'd help."

Jay looks a lot like she's going to burst with glee at her own cleverness. Mark wants to strangle her, but only a little bit.

Eduardo takes a deep breath. "All right," he says. "All right. So I guess we're doing this, then?"

Mark nods.

Eduardo turns back to Jay. "That doesn't mean you're out of the doghouse yet. And Mark, thanks for undermining my authority, by the way."

Jay rolls her eyes. Mark wants to, as well, but he also wants to get another blowjob sometime soon, so.

Then Eduardo stands up from the couch, directing another glare at Jay briefly, but his attention is focused on Mark. He steps in close so that Mark has no way to not look him in the eyes, and says, "If you change your mind tomorrow -"

"I won't."

"If you do," Eduardo says. "I'm hiring ninja assassins." He cracks a smile, but Mark can tell he's only half-kidding.

"We're in a relationship now. Facebooks says so," he says.

"I do actually know by now how to change my relationship status on Facebook."

"I won't if you won't."

In the background, Jay groans. "Just kiss already, Jesus."

Eduardo shakes his head at her, and Mark presses a kiss to Eduardo's cheek. It's a spur-of-the-moment thing, but he knows he does well when Eduardo ducks his head and touches his hand, smiling again.

Later, Mark takes out the printed-and-bound comic Zahra handed to him a few days before he left Singapore.

"It's your side of the story, isn't it?" she'd said. "It's one of the best things you've ever drawn."

It's unfinished, uncolored, imperfect. But his heart is in there and he wants Eduardo to have it. And hopefully, there'll be another volume soon.

  
\-------  
The End  
\--------

  



End file.
